Making Friendship Hard
“Mine be the love that in itself can find Seed of white thoughts, the lilies of the mind, Seed of that glad surrender of the will Which finds in service self’s true purpose still.”
THE secret of being a friend lies in the power to give and do and serve without thought of return. It is not easy. Wanting to have a friend is altogether different from wanting to be a friend. The former is a mere natural human craving; the latter is the life of Christ in the soul. Christ craved friendship, but he longed always to be a friend. Every life that came before him he desired to help and bless in some way. He never tired of the faults and imperfections of his disciples; he was not seeking mere pleasure for himself in them, but was striving to do them good. Hence he never grew tired of them. His interest in them was like that of a kindly physician in his patient.
Wherever the spirit of Christ is in a human heart this same desire is found. True friendship is unwearied in doing good, in serving and helping others. Yet it is only right that the other side of being a friend should have attention. We must not put the love and unselfishness of our friends to too sore a testing.
There are some people who make it very hard for others to be their friends. They put friendship to unreasonable tests. They make demands upon it to which only the largest patience and the most generous charity will submit.
There are some persons who complain that they have no friends, and ofttimes the complaint may be almost true. There are none with whom they have close personal friendship. They have no friend who is ready to share in all their life, rejoicing with them in their joys, and bearing beside them and with them their load of care, sorrow, or anxiety. They seem without real companionship, although all about them throng other lives with the very things of love for which their hearts are crying out.
These unfriended ones think the fault is with the other people, whom they regard as cold, uncongenial, selfish. But really the fault is with themselves. They make it all but impossible for anyone to be their close personal friend. Nothing less holy and less divine than mother-love can endure the exactions and demands they put upon those who would be glad, if they could, to stand in the relation of friends to them.
A close friendship can be formed and can continue to exist only where there is mutual unselfishness. It cannot all be on one side. We cannot expect our friend to give all while we give nothing. We cannot ask that he be generous, patient, confiding, self-denying, and thoughtful toward us, while we in our bearing toward him lack all these qualities. Christ bears with us in all our sad faultiness, is patient toward all our weakness, infirmity, and sin; and is our faithful, unfailing friend, though we give him but little love, and that little mingled with doubts, complainings, murmurings, and ingratitude. Many of us make it hard for Christ to be our friend; yet he loves unto the end, unto the uttermost. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps writes: —
“Thine the bearing and forbearing
Through the patient years;
Thine the loving, and the moving
Plea of sacred tears.
Thine the caring and the wearing
Of my pain for me;
Thine the sharing and the bearing
Of my sin on thee.
Mine the leaving and the grieving
Of thy mournful eyes;
Mine the fretting and forgetting
Of our blood-bound ties.
Mine the plaining and complaining,
And complaining still;
Mine the fearing and the wearying
Of thy tender will.
Mine the wrecking, thine the building,
Of our happiness — My only Saviour, help me make
The dreadful difference less.”
The mothers come next to Christ in their friendship, — patient, unwearying, without re turn. Many children make it very hard even for their mother to be their friend, putting her love to very sore tests. Yet she too loves on, in the face of all ingratitude, unkindness, unworthiness.
But there are few others who will be such friends to us as Christ and our mothers, who will be so patient with us, who will love us and love on when we do not take our just share of the friendship, or when we give only hurt or ingratitude in return for love and tenderness. There are few outside our own family who will take the trouble to maintain close relations with us, when we make it as hard as we can for them to do so. There may be one or two per sons among those who know us, who have love disinterested enough to cling to us in spite of all our wounding of their affection, and all the needless burden we put upon their faithfulness. But such friends are rare, and the man is fortunate who has even one who will be such a friend to him while he puts the friendship to such unreasonable proof.
There are many ways in which friendship is made hard. One way is by doubting and by questioning. There are those who demand repeated assertion and assurance in word, every time they meet their friend, that he is still their friend. If he fails to put his abiding, loyal interest into some fervent, oft-repeated formula of constancy, they begin to wonder if he has not changed in his feeling toward them, and perhaps tell him of their anxiety. A little thought will show any one how hard friendship is made by such a course as this. This spirit indicates want of full trust, and nothing more effectually stunts and deadens the heart’s gentle affections than being doubted. It indicates also a morbid sentimentality, which is very unwholesome.
Such demand for reiterated avowal may be pardoned in very young lovers who have not yet attained to manly or womanly strength, but in the relations of common friendship it should never be made. The moment a true-hearted man, eager to be helpful to another, finds the sentimental spirit creeping in, he is embarrassed in his effort to do a friend’s part; and, if he is not a man of large patience and unwearying kindness, he will find his helpfulness greatly hindered. Many an earnest desire to be a friend is rendered altogether unavailing by such a spirit. In any case, friendship is made hard for a man, however loyal and unselfish he may be.
Another way in which friendship is made hard is by an exacting spirit. There are those who seem to think of a friend only as one who should help them. They value him in proportion to the measure of his usefulness to them. Hence they expect him to show them favors at every point, and to do many things for them. They do not seem to have any conception of the lofty truth that the heart of friendship is not the desire to receive, but the desire to give. We cannot claim to be another’s friend if all we want is to be served by him. We are only declaring our unmitigated selfishness when we act on this principle.
Yet there are those who would exact all and give nothing. Their friend may show them kindnesses in unbroken continuity for years, doing perhaps ofttimes important things for
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them; but the moment he declines or omits to grant some new favor which they have sought, all past acts are instantly forgotten.
There are few generous people who do not repeatedly have just this experience. Of course no return in favors is desired by a true friend. There are many cases indeed in which, in one sense, the helpfulness of the friendship must necessarily be all on one side. It may be so when one is an invalid, unable to do anything, compelled to be a burden continually upon a friend. But in such a case there is a return possible which is a thousand times better than if it could be made in kind — a return of gratitude, of affection, of trust. Such a requital makes friendship easy, though the calls upon it for service may be constant and very heavy. But the spirit here referred to makes it very hard for a friend to go on carrying the load year after year. Demands upon love do not help in the nourishing of love. He who would compel our service, especially he who would enforce demands for manifestations of affection, puts his friend to a very sore test. One may
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be ready to give and serve and suffer for an other, even to the uttermost; but one does not like to do this under compulsion, in order to meet exacting demands.
Another example is that in which one claims a friend exclusively for one’s own. There are such people. They want their friend to show interest in no other, to do kindness to no other. This also might be excused in a certain kind of very sentimental young lovers, but it is not confined to such. It exists in many cases toward others of the same sex, nor is it confined to the very young. Persons have been known to demand that the one who is their friend shall be theirs so exclusively as scarcely to treat others respectfully. Any pleasant courtesy to another has been taken as a personal slight and hurt to the chosen “friend.”
Unless both persons are alike weak and sentimental, such a spirit cannot but make friendship hard. No man or woman who has the true conception of life is willing to be bound in such chains. We cannot fulfil our mission in God’s great world of human beings by per-
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mitting ourselves to be tied up in this sentimental way to any one person. No worthy friendship ever makes such demands. Love knows no such limitations; only jealousy can inspire such narrowness, and jealousy is always ignoble and dishonoring. A noble wife and husband, bound in one, in the most sacred of ties, make no such weak and selfish demand upon each other. Each desires the other, while loyal and true in the closer relation, to be the largest possible blessing to all the world, knowing that their mutual love is not made less, but richer, by the exercise of unselfishness toward all who need help.
The same spirit should be manifested in all friendships, and will be manifested just so far as they are noble and exalted in character, and are set free from narrowness and jealousy. A man need be no less my friend, no less true, no less helpful to me, because he is the friend of hundreds more who turn to him with their cravings and needs, and find strength and inspiration in him. The heart grows rich in loving, and my friend becomes more to me through being the friend of others. But if I demand that he shall be my friend only, I make it very hard for him to be my friend at all.
Only a few suggestions have been given of the way in which many people make it hard for others to be their friends. Not only do they make it hard for their friends to continue their faithfulness and helpfulness to them, but they rob themselves of the full, rich blessings which they might receive, and lessen the value to them of the friendship which they would make of yet greater value. We can get the most and the best from our friends by being large-hearted and trustful ourselves, by putting no trammels on them, by making no demands or exactions, by seeking to be worthy of whatever they may wish to do for us, by accepting what their love prompts in our behalf, proving our gratitude by a friendship as sincere, as hearty, as disinterested, and as helpful as it is in our power to give. Thus shall we make it easy for others to be our friends, and shall never have occasion to say that nobody cares for us.
In what has been said, it is not intended to
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teach that in our friendships we should be impatient and easily wearied with the faults and imperfections of those whom we seek to help. We should not be easily offended or driven away. On the other hand, we should be as nearly perfect as possible in our patience and endurance. We should be Christlike, and Christ loves unto the uttermost. His love is not worn out by our faultiness, our dulness, nor even by our sinning. We cannot be full, rich blessings in the world unless we have in us, in large measure, the love that seeketh not its own, is not provoked, beareth all things, endureth all things, and never faileth. The capacity for being a blessing to others is a capacity for loving; and the capacity for loving is a capacity for self-denial, for long-suffering, for the giving of its own life without thought of return.
To many it does not seem worth while to give labor and thought and time and strength and patience and comfort at such cost, to help along through life the weak, the broken, the sinning, ofttimes the unreasonable, the ungrateful. But it was thus that Christ lived, and there is no other standard of living that will reach up to the divine ideal. Besides, it is such losing of self that is the only real saving of a life.