“There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” (John 15:13).

Our familiarity with this verse may mask the rather surprising choice of words employed by Jesus to capture and express the essence of sacrificial love for others.

One’s friends?  What about a husband laying down his life, giving himself up, for his wife?  Granted, Paul will declare that such a commitment to one’s spouse reflects Christ’s ultimate love for His bride, the church, but Jesus doesn’t use the husband and wife picture here.  What about a parent, a father or mother, risking his or her life or taking a fatal blow so that their child may be spared?  Again, while this is an undeniably definitive expression of agape love, Jesus passes over it in favor of one’s friends.

Why did Jesus choose to focus on friendship?   Is it because not all people are married or will marry?  Is it because not everyone has or will have children?  Is it because every single one of us needs to value and treasure the blessings of friendship?  Jesus wasn’t married, and He didn’t have children.  But, He had friends: a wide circle, an inner circle, tax collector and sinner friends, beloved friends like Martha, Mary, and Lazarus (John 11:5, 11), and, for a time, a best friend named John (John 3:28-30).

The cover of the September issue of Christianity Today asks the question, “Why Can’t Men Be Friends?”  This question is explored by two feature articles, “’Til Death Do Us Part” by Wesley Hill and “I Didn’t Marry My Best Friend” by Kate Shellnut.  Both authors shed significant light and offer unique perspectives on the subject of the deep need for friendship among Christians, even, and perhaps especially, among believers who are married.

Kate Shellnut tackles the ubiquitous matrimonial mantra, “I married my best friend,” a phrase “now so standard in romantic rhetoric that we forget it’s not part of the traditional [wedding] ceremony.”

Here are a few notable nuggets from Shellnut’s pushback against this common expression of conventional wisdom and popular sentimentality.

Marrying your best friend is enough of a cultural expectation that if I admit I didn’t, people might pity me.  But here’s the secret: I’m actually the lucky one.  I have a husband who isn’t my best friend.  And I have a best friend whom I’m not married to.  They play different roles in my life and I need them both.

The phrase implies that, since married people have each other, they don’t have best friends anymore and don’t need them.  And it exaggerates the risks young couples already face: setting up unhealthy expectations, looking to each other as the sole source of fulfillment.  It also relegates best friends to the realm of singleness.

Even if couples don’t announce that they’re marrying their best friend, many newlyweds live out this philosophy, dropping out of the friend-making game once they have a ring on their finger.  Sociologists find that these days, we typically form our most meaningful friendships prior to age 28.  Not coincidentally, that’s also the average age we get married.

I didn’t marry my best friend.  Instead, I married my husband, with all of my best friends beside me to celebrate.  It was the happiest day of my life.  I got – and still get – to have both.

Wesley Hill opens his case for Christian friendship by appealing to a statement from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, expressed in a letter from prison to a treasured friend.  Bonhoeffer wrote that, unlike marriage and kinship, friendship “has no generally recognized rights, and therefore depends entirely on its own inherent quality.”  Hill describes how intimate friendships, so important in our youth, decline as people, particularly men, grow older.  “Afraid of being perceived as gay or feminine,” men often withdraw from close friendships with other men, and “afraid of crossing boundaries of propriety,” many never develop meaningful friendships with those of the opposite sex.

Hill identifies himself as a gay, single, celibate Christian, who is committed to the traditional Biblical understanding that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.  He writes, “When I contemplate a lifetime of celibacy, I know I want committed friends who will walk beside me on the journey.”  How much easier would that journey be for Hill with the love, support, and encouragement of numerous devoted Christian friends, both men and women, married and single?

My heart was touched as Hill wrote:

I need people who know what time my plane lands, who will worry about me when I don’t show up when I say I will.  I need people I can call and tell about that funny thing that happened in the hallway after class.  I need to know that, come hell or high water, a few people will stay with me, loving me in spite of my faults and caring for me when I’m down.  More, I need people for whom I can care.  As a friend of mine put it, you want someone for whom you can make soup when she’s sick, not just someone who will make soup for you when you’re sick.”

I have been blessed throughout my life with incredible friends, both male and female.  I have great memories of grade school friends in Louisville and Richmond, Kentucky, with a missionary stint in Monrovia, Liberia, sandwiched in between the two.  I had wonderful high school friends in Lewisburg, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama.  Thanks largely to Facebook, I am still in contact with several college friends, both from Faulkner University (formerly Alabama Christian College) and Lipscomb University, including my roommate from Lipscomb with whom I have been blessed to visit annually for the last few years.

In the 26 years since my marriage to Kim, our lives have been greatly enriched by our relationships with friends (some hers, some mine, and some ours) in Tennessee, Hawaii, Alabama, Texas, and now Oklahoma.  I am grateful that our commitment to our marriage has not required that we close off our hearts and lives to others through meaningful and needful friendships.

During our nine years with the McDermott Road church in Plano, Texas, my heart became closely knit together with several brothers in Christ.  These relationships were forged in the context and crucible of a rapidly growing church plant, with all the attendant excitement, sense of mission, constant adjustments, and periodic challenges along the way.  Our time together was both extensive and intensive, resulting in close, intimate friendship.

I have been similarly blessed with friendships over the last five years of my life, especially in developing relationships with some men who are several years younger than myself.  It took me a while to accept that, now in my early 50s, I can be an encouraging older brother/mentor/friend/confidant to those whose lives are at points a decade or two or three behind my own.

Among my friends, there is none closer or dearer to me than Jeff Watson.  If I’ve ever had “a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24), it is Jeff.  In 2009, although he had only known me for three months, he took a day off from work to help me move into our new home in Tulsa.  When Mom passed away in 2010, Jeff drove Kim and the kids from Tulsa to Alabama, stayed for the funeral, and then drove my car back to Oklahoma for me.  He has taken care of my lawn and garden on numerous occasions when I’ve been out of town.  He has ridden shotgun with me on distant speaking engagements, just to provide company and encouragement.

Jeff and I took a quick “man trip” to Tennessee a few weeks ago, visiting a few family members and friends, attending the Diana Singing (a subject matter worthy of its own post sometime in the future), and taking in several sites on a “Pyles family history and nostalgia tour.”  As I droned on and on about relatives, ancestors, farms, memories, cemeteries, and other places of significance to me, Jeff not only listened carefully and patiently, he asked follow-up questions just to make sure he had the facts and stories straight.  Who does that?  Who cares enough to even want to remember such things?  A true friend!

Friends like Jeff and Deanna Watson are not just like family to us; they are family.  They have blessed our lives in immeasurable and incomparable ways, not because of the duty of blood, but because of the choice of friendship and the gift of love.

Among the places Jeff and I visited was Ebenezer Hollow in the extreme southern portion of Marshall County.  Non-existent as a community for decades now, Ebenezer was the place to which my Pyles family forbears migrated from North Carolina nearly 200 years ago in the early 1820s.  Ebenezer is a special place to me; rugged and remote; wooded hills; a peaceful place of connection for me to people I never knew, but whose blood runs through my veins.

Ebenezer means “stone of help” (I Samuel 7:12).  Samuel, the priest of Israel, set up a memorial stone, commemorating the Lord’s faithfulness and deliverance, and named the stone Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”

Today I raise a memorial stone to friendship.  Like Samuel, I call it Ebenezer, “stone of help.”

To my friends, old and new, far and near:  I would not be where I am or who I am without your help, your encouragement, your love, your compassion, your kindness, and your forgiveness!  Thank you!

Make sure your friends know how you feel about them!  Celebrate them!  Praise them!  Encourage them!  Support them!  Journey with them!  Be there for them!  Laugh and cry with them!  Tell them that you love them!