With Valentine’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about all different kinds of love – love in marriage, love in friendship, love in relationship with God.  While we often spend lots of time thinking about love within marriage or in our relationship with God, past the age of about twenty-two, we don’t usually spend much time thinking about love within friendship.  It’s a topic often relegated to our younger years.

But friendship is an important topic because it is such an important part of our lives.  And recently, no one has taught me more about friendship than my daughter, Caroline, and her constant compadre, Tess (also known as “Dr. Phil” when it comes to relationships in Caroline’s world – click here to read about that from last week’s blog).

Tess Tredennick, affectionately known as “Tessy” around our house, is one of my favorite people on the planet. She’s about four feet tall, has a tangle of blonde curls that always look like they may or may not have been brushed, wears cute purple glasses, and never does anything without a leap, skip, laugh, skid, or cartwheel.

Like my daughter Caroline, Tess is seven years old, and for as long as I can remember, Caroline has called Tess her “twin.” Whenever her sisters try to correct her (and trust me, lots of correcting goes on over here with two big sisters because what in the world would we do without their wise and insightful direction in our lives?), Caroline says with passion (she doesn’t really say things without passion), “Tessy IS TOO my twin! I’ve known her since before we were BORN, and I LOVE her!” Obviously, Caroline has a lot to learn about the birds and the bees, but for now, to her, being a twin means knowing and loving someone since before they were born and loving them still just as much seven years down the road.

Caroline and Tess celebrated their first birthday together along with their friend Gray, and they have had almost every birthday party together since.

I think what amazes me the most about these two is that they don’t seem to see or at least dwell on each other’s faults or imperfections.  They see each other through rose-colored glasses, loving and accepting each other exactly as they are.  And they have always been that way.  I can’t remember a time when Caroline didn’t love Tess and Tess didn’t love Caroline.  And when they are together, I never have to intervene or referee and blow the whistle or pull one aside and have “the talk” about how one needs to include the other one.  They always seem to be completely content in each other’s presence.  And when Tessy leaves town, well, life just isn’t quite the same…

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That amazes me.  I think partly because I remember having a best friend like that when I was little –  a friend who could do no wrong, and every available second I wanted to spend in her presence.  And partly because somewhere along the way as women, we begin to see each other through jaded, green, envy-colored glasses instead of rosy, I-love-you-just-the-way-you-are kind of glasses.

I’m not sure why or when that transition happens, but it’s a transition that I’ve been trying to undo or fight against now for years.  Because as women, our natural, sin-cursed inclination (thank you, Eve) is to see what people are not doing, or not saying, or not being as opposed to embracing exactly who they are, where they are, and with what they are able to offer.

So the past few years I have been taking lessons from Tessy and Caroline and working on trying to come alongside my friends, instead of standing from far off envying, coveting, and viewing life through the lens of a closed circle instead of an open one (click here to read more on that).

Caroline and Tess have also reminded me in a season of life where the needs and wants of family seem to take up every waking moment that friends are not “icing on the top” reserved for dessert and special occasions, but my friends are the necessary stuff of everyday life.  The course that goes in the plain, smack-dab middle instead of reserved for special occasions or time at the end.  They have given me permission to stay present and enjoy and delight in my friends when there is always the possibility of choosing to complete one more task instead of practicing the presence of people.  And that’s been a necessary lesson for a task-driven, tight-margin momma like me to learn during this season of life with four young children.

None of us have time or space for playdates and sleepovers like we did when we were little, but all of us need to be reminded of the necessity and delight of weaving our friends into the everyday fabric of our lives.  Because in modern times, friendship, as CS Lewis writes in his book, The Four Loves, has become “something quite marginal; not a main course in life’s banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks of one’s time.  How has this come about?…Friendship is – in a sense not at all derogatory to it – the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary.  It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale…Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship.  The species, biologically considered, has no need of it…but few value [friendship] because few experience it.”

In other words, friendship doesn’t cause anything warm or fuzzy to rise up in us like romance, or give us anything back like the love of a child.  Friendship requires you to give the most with the least likely promise of reward or return.  In other words, friendship requires risk.  But friendship also offers great reward.

“Friendship, unlike Eros [Romantic love], is uninquisitive.  You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. ..In a circle of Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself.  No one cares two-pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race or previous history.  Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end.  But casually.  They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for a anecdote; never for their own sake.  That is the kingliness of Friendship…Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities”  (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

In friendship, we have the opportunity to love and be loved simply for who we are, no strings attached.  Not because of what we can give someone or what they can give us.  But simply because we stand side by side and and see and love the same truth.  “You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

And as we live and fight and read and pray side by side, friendship also teaches us to love not for the sake of getting anything back but simply because in doing so, we are loving others in the way Jesus Himself loved us: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lays down his life for his friends” (John 15:13, emphasis mine). And in laying our lives down, we finally are able to take our eyes off of ourselves and become the people God has called us to be while encouraging and beholding the image of God in one another.  And as we do so, “each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest.  Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters.  He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company.  Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others….Life – natural life – has no better gift to give.  Who could have deserved it?”  (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

In light of the knowledge of the gift that friendship is and because of the strong, steady, life-giving friendships God has given us, Jason and I are constantly encouraging and reminding one another: pursue your friends.  Not because we are such great friends, but because we can tend to be such poor friends.  It’s easier to check something tangible off of a list than sit in connection over a cup of coffee.  Yet over the cups of coffee is where our souls are known and valued and loved for who we are rather than for the things we do.  And in those places of total transparency, vulnerability, and friendship, we are free to let our guards down and let others in to walk alongside of us, imperfections and all, on the road before us.

I wish making time for friends was as easy as an adult as it was as a kid.  I wish someone would come in with a pencil on my calendar and schedule playdates and birthday parties and sleep overs for me and my friends just like I do for my girls and their friends.  But those days are over, and now it is my responsibility to have intentional time with friends who see the same truth and challenge me to lay my life down and grow more into the person God has called me to be.  And it is when I weave these times of friendship into the main course at the table of life instead of the dessert at the end, that I am most whole, balanced, full, and richly blessed.

Lewis closes his essay on friendship with this: “[I]n Friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our birthdays, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting – any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends ‘You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others….At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”

When we understand that God is the one who has set the table of our friendships and brought specific people into our lives for “such a time as this,” we begin to fight for our friendships instead of against them.  We take off our prickles and put on grace.  We set aside our tasks and pull up a chair at the feast of transparency, accountability, and love.  And we begin to delve into the feast of friendship, if we are seven or seventy-seven years old.

This Valentine’s Day, as I look at the table God has set before me of Godly, strong, humble, kind, wise, beautiful women, I am astounded and humbled that I have a place at their table.  And each time I sit down in their presence, I encounter a Christ-like love that shapes me into a better wife, a better mom, a better teacher, a better person, a better friend.  And, let’s face it, they give me the necessary tools of laugher and permission to eat as much chocolate as I want or need to make it through one day, one week, one season, one year at a time.

This Valentine’s Day, take an honest evaluation of yourself as a friend and the table God has set before you.  Are you a good friend who loves others for who they are, right where they are?  Or are you always standing off at a distance waiting to be asked in instead of being brave enough to day in and day out simply walk alongside?  Do you make enough time for your friends to really speak into and shape your life?  Not just an occasional lunch or cup of coffee, but true iron-sharpening-iron, a true love that stands the test of time and can speak truth and hear truth because it is spoken in love?

If not, don’t despair.  But take off your jaded, green, micro-managing, task and time driven glasses, and put on lenses that see through the rose color of love and grace that true friendship offers one meal, one conversation, one encounter at a time.