The importance of friends

Friend and co-laborer Bryan Johnson and I were talking yesterday about friends. He made note of something I have not thought about before. Our friends are extremely important to us, but we spend most of our time away from our friends. In actuality, we are with our friends only a small sliver of any given week. For that matter, I often go for more than a week without seeing many of my friends. I might not even communicate with them for many days at a time. Yet I can pick up a conversation with a good friend as if it has been a half hour since we last talked. This is because we carry our friends with us in our interior worlds. Our friends are in our thoughts. In this way, as long as we have friends, we are never alone.

This being the case, it is all the more important that we speak words of encouragement to our friends. That is what they will carry into their mental and emotional worlds. It is the tone our friendship will take in those spans of time between seeing each other or communicating.