Good morning, Digital Neighbors! Happy Thursday! How about a few thoughts on friendship, along with some fitting quotes? Few things can make a bigger difference in a person’s life than a good friend. We don’t need many. Sometimes just one is enough to make our pilgrimage through life more bearable and joyful. Having a handful of them is a true abundance of riches.

I doubt any of us can have “lots” of friends, because the depth of sharing and time required to form a durable friendship simply takes time. Friendships come in all kinds of depths and degrees. I pray your life is blessed with some. If not, I hope you can find some degree of connection, understanding, and acceptance when you venture onto these intentional communities.

One can be friendly, welcoming, and genuinely interested in one’s neighbor, and that openness can become a springboard for some type of friendship. Again, the depth, degree, and bandwidth may vary. Some friendships may last only for a few chapters of our life, while others remain with us until the end.

Those lifelong friends are rare, and maintaining them is worth the effort. They know us because they have walked the journey with us. They have witnessed our growth, seen our screw-ups, and perhaps even endured some rough waters with us—as we have with them—and they are still here. Still with us. Still listening. Still performing that much-needed dance of sanity: accepting us while at the same time helping us overcome the extremes of our personalities that are often ruinous in familial or other relationships.

Friendships of depth do something nearly divine: they accept us as we are, but they also call us to be more—to strive to become the better person we ought to be. Somehow, they glimpse what is hidden to us and can patiently help us discover it. Friendships are depth need not be lifelong friends; they may enter our story at the right chapter and offer us a gift of understanding and an invitation of adventurous growth that might not otherwise happen. They are one of the happier experiences of life.

Friends are among the few people who can teach us new dance moves in the world of human relationships. Too often we find ourselves stuck in certain patterns inherited from family or set in place at work, with no way to break out of those set moves unless we are willing to make a break with the situation. That is rarely a happy decision, but I have known many over the years in ministry whose family “dance moves” were so set in dysfunctional concrete that exiting the situation was the only solution at the time.

Well, enough musing on friendship. I am thankful for the ones God has placed in my life—the one who has been with me through most of my story, a few mid-chapter additions, and the unique type of friendship this medium can afford when we connect with people and get to know them beyond the 👍 or ❤️ emojis. Have a great Thursday dear neighbors!

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light. —Helen Keller

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. —C. S. Lewis

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books. —Irving Stone

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families. —Jay McInerney