THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FRIENDSHIP [M, 7-3-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FRIENDSHIP [M, 7-3-23]

 

“You come up here right now and get this SOB out of this house or I’m going to kill him!”

“Okay,” I said. “Hang up the phone. I’ll call back. Let him answer.”

She did. I did. He did.

“Hey, I’ve got to come to Champaign today,” I told him. “Can we get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure. That would be great.”

I knew he was available. He’d just retired a couple of weeks before. That’s why Joan was at her wit’s end. His job had kept him out of the house most of every day and night. Now he was home all the time. As the old saying goes, “I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”

I drove the 55 miles in record time. We got coffee. Then I said I had to go to a bookstore. We had to poke around in several, since none had a copy of Borden Parker Bowne’s Personalism. I wasn’t really surprised; it was out of print. Then I said that since it was lunch time we might as well eat together. He called Joan to see if that was okay. She said it was. We had lunch at our favorite greasy spoon. Then I suggested we try out the new fancy dessert bar at Krannert Center. It was supper time when I got home.

Helen was still working. She asked me what I had done that day. “Saved a life,” I said. She accepted that as normal.

It was a good day. Joan trusted me. Trusted me to save Jack’s life. Trusted me to save her sanity. Trusted me to know who was calling on the phone, just which SOB’s life was in danger, without identifying herself at all. She knew other people she could call, who lived closer, who could get Jack out of the house quicker, but she knew that she could trust me to do it without asking why.

Like many of my women friends, Joan started out at the wife of a man friend. But over time, she became a friend in her own right.

 To be trusted with the sort of responsibility she gave me, that is true friendship.

Although they never knew each other, I always think of Joan and Ben together.

Ben was a church member who never came to church. Ben wasn’t anti-church. He was just more pro-sofa. But when his heart went bad at the same time I started a year of chemo, we became best friends. We were both expected to die.

I called on him often, usually in his hospital stays as they became longer and harder. We talked together. We prayed together. We wept together. Finally, when his fate was clear, and mine was still undecided, he said, “I’ll die for both of us, and you live for both of us.”

Like Joan, Ben gave me a responsibility for life.

That is true friendship.

John Robert McFarland