What's In A Friend?

This December 2017, I had the great privilege of wandering around the lower portions of Chile and Argentina, hiking and camping and hosteling in the Patagonia region of South America.  Of a different kind and even greater privilege, I shared this wandering with an extraordinary friend whose presence gave each of our encounters with the world around us a deeper and more personal meaning.

Chris and I are a lot alike.  We both love the outdoors, love to hike and climb and capture the view from high places, love to push ourselves to always go further, always do it better.  We both love to read, love to stay in shape, love a good craft beer, and we love each other’s company.  But mostly what makes us alike is our faith and that, more than anything, is what transformed our great adventure into a spiritual journey.  When the 50+ mph winds gusts thundered like a train down the side of the mountain next to our campsite, startling us into consciousness at 3 AM and tearing our tent’s fabric and breaking its poles, we thought of it as “the hand of God” pressing the tent down into our bodies and presenting us with “a change of plans.”  Later we would realize that by leaving Torres Del Paine a day earlier than planned, we had just the right amount of time (and a new more wind resistant tent) to take in the even more spectacular experience of Fitz Roy.  And, three days later, when we finally crested the rise that would give us the close-up view of Fitz Roy that we hoped for, the clouds parted as if just for us and we together knew what we wanted and needed to do.  Standing in awe of the breathtaking extravagance of God’s creation, we couldn’t help but hold each other side by side and pray.  The grandeur of the world around us was made personal by our shared sense that all of this was the expression of a Creator who loves us….. an exhibition of grace.

But Chris and I are also not alike.  Perhaps most immediately obvious is our difference in age, him being 28 and me 64.  I tend to think that this does not matter much (actually, I tend to completely forget about our age difference!) but during our trip I began to see this a bit differently.  Our age difference meant that we had and were growing up in different times, and we saw the world differently from each other because we had, in a real sense, grown up in radically different cultures.  I remember life before color TV, computers, the Internet, and cellphones.  I’ve never played a video game and as a result have limited dexterity in my opposable thumbs.  The world I grew up in bears the indelible marks of the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Chris‘s world bears the indelible marks of the Great Recession, the exposure of the Internet, and the “always in touch and on stage” nature of Facebook.  He’s more connected than me, more social than me, more entrepreneurial than me, more driven than me, more real-world than me.  He’s a man of action, whereas I’m more a man of thought.

It is this combination – this balance – of being like me and being different than me that makes Chris such an important and valued friend.  He drives me deeper into the ways in which we are the same – our faith, our sense of place and purpose in the universe – and he broadens me in the ways in which we are different – encouraging in me a more adventuresome and entrepreneurial spirit.

One of the things that Chris and I did on our trip was read the same book – Bonnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.  While the title might sound a bit depressing, the lessons from the book were anything but, providing the two of us with insights not on how to die, but instead on how to live.  One of those insights was on the potential of friendship to give our lives meaning and purpose and hope.  Bonnie Ware gave powerful examples of the kinds and qualities of friendships that are best at enriching our lives, and both Chris and I thought and shared about this in terms of our friendship with each other, with others, and especially with our wives.

As Bonnie Ware and others have pointed out, in a very real sense we are defined by our friendships, by the friends we choose to have.  The question is, do our friendships reinforce who we already are, or encourage and support us in moving toward who we might become?  Do they emphasize security, or opportunity?  Do they inspire us, or deaden our hopes?  Do they energize us, or anaesthetize us?  Do they hold us back or propel us forward?  Do they love us, or do they simply find us convenient, comfortable, like the shape of a beer can in their hand?

In one of the best and hardest books I have ever read, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, I find this advice:

 “The only trick 

of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are — not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving — and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad — or good — it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

Like the extravagance of God’s creation, like the prayer offered because it is the only meaningful response, my life is given meaning and purpose and value by the friends with which I am blessed…… friends like Chris.

C. C. Lewis writes, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”  Like the kind of friend we all need, Chris helps give it all value…….

Hunting Camp and Inclusion

About 18 years ago I found myself at the annual hunting camp of my friend Bruce, who was at the time the Under-Sheriff for Park County, Wyoming.  Both Bruce and I are originally from Minnesota so, when I moved to Wyoming he took it upon himself to orient me to Wyoming culture, at the center of which was elk hunting.  I had never hunted for anything bigger than a pheasant before so my “orientation” proved to be a steep learning curve.  Nevertheless, having successfully shot a cow elk in my first season, Bruce felt I was ready to join him and his buddies at his hunting camp for my second hunting season.  By “buddies,” I soon found out, Bruce meant a gathering of about 10 law enforcement officers, most of whom were also from Minnesota.  Among them was Jim.

Jim was maybe 10 years older than I was, a retired officer of the Minneapolis Police Force, and a great storyteller. We hit it off almost immediately and were soon sharing our stories of life in Minnesota: fishing, farming, hunting and, of course, the weather.  But, when Jim began to tell his stories about providing police coverage for anti-war protests on the University of Minnesota Campus, it was more than his great storytelling that made me feel as if I had been there too………  because I had been. 

Jim sat there quietly as I shared with him that I had been one of those protesters and that it was highly likely that he and I had been on the UofM campus on the same day, on opposite side of the protest lines.  When I finished, Jim remained silent and I wondered if this would be the quick end to budding friendship.  But then he said “those were different times” and then he and I went on to share more stories and a great hunting weekend….. and I felt included.

Inclusion.  A foundational part of our LBCC Mission, one of our five Values and one of the seven Strategic Initiatives in our Strategic Plan.  Obviously, Inclusion is important to us at LBCC…. but it’s also hard.  Inclusion is easy when we all see things the same way, say things the same way, walk down the same road the same way…. but we don’t.  Instead, we bring – we embody – differences in history, culture, beliefs, economics, race, gender, sexual orientation, and hundreds of other differences that tend to separate us into camps, place us on opposite sides of issues, and on the opposite sides of protest lines….. like Jim and me.

Nonetheless, Jim and I saw each other across those lines and included each other in each other’s lives.  Perhaps it was the vantage point that comes from being a decade or two away from and older than we were at our first “meeting,” but what we realized in our second meeting at that hunting camp was that there were good patriotic Americans – and good people - on both sides of those protest lines.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I, along with many scholars, suspect that the writers of the Declaration of Independence did not fully appreciate all that would come to be understood in these words, but few would suggest that they would be anything other than pleased with the expanding and absolute understanding of Inclusion that the word “all” has come to mean for us as Americans… and for us here at LBCC.

“To engage in an education that enables all of us . . .”

Whether we wave a peace sign or an American flag, whether we stand or kneel or lock arms in solidarity, whether we know God’s name as Jesus, Yahweh, Allah or some other name, whether we are Native American, European American, Latino American, Black American or some other American, whether we are gay or straight or something else, and whether we are liberal or conservative or something else, there is nothing in these differences that make us anything other than good people who have a right to and a place in our country, our community, and here at LBCC.  This is what Inclusion means…. “all of us.”