Friends

Dedication:

Katy, for being my bestest friend.

‘A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.’ - Proverbs 18:24

Everyone’s got a friend.

Everyone has someone who they talk to occasionally and who gossip back and forth. There’s always those few people who you like enough to spend time with them.

But there will only be one person special enough to be your best friend.

People in 2024, in the 21st century, even, have ignored the correct use of the word ‘friend.’ They’ve used the wrong definition for many words, but this is one of the more important ones.

The word friend in the English dictionary is defined as: ‘a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection.’

Now that’s not entirely false. Mutual affection is one of the core parts of friendship, but how many times does it take you to rule out if someone actually had affection for you? How many times does it take to know that person you’ve been talking to is your friend? How many times does it take you to realize this person is doing nothing for you emotionally or spiritually.

(I’m going to take a moment and tell you that healing emotionally is definitely different than healing spiritually. To heal spiritually you first have to cut all the ties you made that began as lies, and that is often emotionally terrifying. But stick with me.)

Proverbs is a book filled with knowledge and intelligence, and it’s so full of pure right’s and wrongs, and it will set you in the right path, no matter the cost.

This is one reason why I chose this verse.

Because even if you have hundreds of ‘friends’, you will never be as rich as the man with one closer than a brother.

Siblings are our given family. We can’t choose them. Heck, if I ever met one of my siblings out in public I would probably never even think of them as potential friends. Not because they’re bad people, of course, but because they’re so different than I am that conversation is often scattered.

While I know my sisters as siblings, I get to explore knowing someone apart from the similarities we have with eachother. The variety of things we talk about at the dinner table is amazing.

I just wouldn’t have chosen them as friends.

So that one person you choose to spend time with. That one person who you make time for is the one person who’s closer than a sibling, because you chose them. Because in the midst of the 8-billion-or-whatever people there are in the world, you chose them.

And those people chose your back.

They’re the people who you work for, the people who you choose to be around. They’re the friends that cry on your shoulder and the friends who sit in silence with you when you need silence. And they’re the people who are only a phone call away. Those are your best friends and those people are irreplaceable.

-Claudia