Friendship is an odd thing. A couple months ago I had a friend from college stay the night before an interview he had here in Kentucky. We talk on a fairly regular basis and most of the time he was here was simply talking about life, over pizza, movies and playing with the dog we just talked. For those who don’t know me so well I’m an outdoorsy guy. I wear shorts and a t-shirt all the time. I enjoy backpacking for days at a time. I like shooting, white water rafting, and would much rather be in the mountains than the beach any day of the week. I’m usually up late doing homework and up early ish to work. This friend though is almost the complete opposite. He wears golf polo’s to almost everything, lays out to work on his tan, greatly prefers the beach, only shot a gun once (years ago), has been hiking, but is back to take a shower and sleep in a “real” bed (whatever that means), and stays up late watching movies with his roommates and sleeps in being that he controls a good part of his work schedule. We reflected on this, how different we are and how we even became friends in the first place. But that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say that both are very glad we are friend despite all the differences and love every one of them!!

I tend to be more the kind of person who has lots of friends, but not many of those friends at all know me on the deeper “best friend” level. It’s been harder for me over the years to have that deeper friendship. After high school I left my home town to go to college. After college I left for an internship and then even left that for a job and grad school. There have been very few people who have known me in each of those stages of life that I have kept up with and have that deeper level of friendship.

I cannot help but wonder how Jesus did it when he was here. What kind of friends were the 12 Disciples? How well did they know Jesus? In John 15:15 Jesus calls them friends. Spending the vast majority of three ish years together I’d say they were pretty close. The one things that stands out as different was the amount of time actually together doing life as a group. They saw the good, the bad and the ugly of each other and were still friends. Sure, we see them arguing amongst themselves every now and then, but they stuck together.

If I could do a little complaining for a moment, in my opinion, this is the downfall of our society with so much social media use. It is great for getting information out and connecting with old friends. However, what it has become is how we communicate with each other even in we are in the same room as the other person! So much life is done now over the internet and social media it is having a devastating effect on relationships of all kinds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m on social media and I’m grateful for what it has to offer, but any good thing taken too far become a very bad thing, and that’s exactly what’s happened.

I want to challenge you to do something this week (or next because I am really having trouble remembering to get these out by Wednesday!!). Invite a friend or family over for an extended game night. Someone that you are friends but maybe not super close, but someone with whom you want to develop a deeper friendship. Have dinner, play a game or two, send kids away to play if they are there, then have some meaningful and purposeful dialogue. Just talk. Oh, and go the entire night without any kind of technology or social media. Doing this once is good, once a month is really good, every other week is great! But I am fully convinced that this is how God intended us to live life with each other. More connected face to face together, doing life, serving others, eating, having fun, learning, simply living together.