FamilyLife Today®

Drew Hunter: We are in some ways the most connected generation ever. Social media and the internet and ways of connecting over text messages and phone calls mean people have never been able to connect this quickly with this many people. And yet we are the most disconnected generation as well.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Ann Wilson: Did you have a best friend growing up?

Dave Wilson: I knew you were going to ask me that and I literally thought of the first name that came to my mind, Marty Jordan.

Ann Wilson: You've had so many friends. You always have a friend. You didn't have a best friend?

Dave Wilson: I was in New Jersey and then my parents divorced and I ended up in Ohio. Marty Jordan was one of my best friends all the way through college and then he passed. You don't even know Marty.

Ann Wilson: I met him and I know that his mom listens.

Dave Wilson: I've gotten direct messages every once in a while from his mom.

Ann Wilson: I feel like you're unusual in that you've always had really good friends. My dad and my brothers, I have two brothers and my dad, they were really good friends with one another but they really didn't have many friends. And so I thought you were really unique because you had so many male friends.

Dave Wilson: I do remember when Jim, your brother's son, came up for a while, like a week, and stayed with us in Michigan. Remember what he said? He said, "You have guys coming over like every other day. I've never seen anything quite like that."

Ann Wilson: People are walking in the door all the time. What's going on? And I love that. So today we're talking about friendship, obviously, and we've got Drew Hunter in the studio. I guess you're the expert on friendship?

Drew Hunter: I don't know if I'd call myself an expert, but I've thought about it a lot and care about it a lot and want to help other people think and care about it.

Dave Wilson: Well, I mean, you've done a lot of thinking on a topic a lot of people don't do a lot of thinking on. Your book is called Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys. So I'll ask you what Ann just asked me. Did you have a best friend growing up?

Drew Hunter: I did, although as you were talking I was thinking about two that were probably both my best friend. Derek and Brett. I grew up in northern Illinois when I was younger and they were in my neighborhood and we had a lot of woods around us, so we just spent a lot of time growing up as friends and there's some goofy pictures of us.

Dave Wilson: How about today?

Drew Hunter: If I was to say one person was my best friend it would be my brother Trent, who's become my closest friend. But I kind of intentionally don't think about someone as a best friend because I have several that are close and just at least for me I don't want to pick one over others. I have several that I'm really close to and have unique relationships with.

Ann Wilson: And when you say that as a woman you're afraid that it's going to hurt your other friends' feelings. Really? Drew, you're married and you have four sons. Do you want your sons to have friends?

Drew Hunter: Yes, we talk about that a lot about choosing friends wisely. We talk about kids at school. We want them to have a mindset that they're friendly with everyone, so there's not going to be a sense of, "Well you're not my friend therefore I shouldn't care about you." But it takes a lot of wisdom to pick your friends well because you become like your friends. We see that happening in their life already and so we want them to have good friends, to be good friends, and to think about that growing up.

Ann Wilson: Why did you write about this?

Drew Hunter: A few reasons. When I first started thinking about the topic, it was about twelve or thirteen years ago now and I was teaching through Proverbs. I sat down with the book of Proverbs and just would read through it and collect themes. I just wanted to say, "What are the most prominent themes in Proverbs and I'll collect what Proverbs says about it and teach on those themes."

I was not expecting friendship to be part of the list. I was expecting money and words from reading through Proverbs over the years, but I had just not seen just how significant friendship was in particular. Even relationships, I was thinking about loving people, loving your neighbor, marriage relationships, those kinds of things, but I was struck by how many very specific and striking things Proverbs said about friendship.

So I started to study it, and then as I was studying that week, it drew me to John 15 where Jesus calls his disciples friends. I just realized, my goodness, I have read this who knows how many times, so I have a category for it at some level, but I have not really taken this as seriously and internalized this as I should.

That week was really pivotal for me. After that I just kept thinking about friendship. So I had friends growing up and through my life I valued friendships, but I realized after thinking about it deeply or much at all, I think that week I realized I've never spent five straight minutes thinking intentionally about this.

I've read books about marriage and parenting now, but never read anything on friendship. I never had conversations or heard lectures or sermons directly on friendship. So I started talking to people about this and realized their experience was the same and that we all really value friendship, but we realize after thinking about it I had one friend who said to me, after we started talking for a few minutes, he said, "I'm a really lousy friend." And that's common. I disagreed with him because he's one of my friends and he's a great friend, but we do realize that without intentionality there are gaps in our lives here.

Over time why it ended up being a book is because just noticing that there really weren't at the time many resources at all from a biblical Christian perspective on friendship. It seemed to be lacking and we were in and we continue to be in a steep decline in just experiencing friendship. Plenty of studies show that. So all those things came together to create the need for this book.

Ann Wilson: I've talked to so many wives and we'll talk about our friendship and we'll talk about our husbands' friendship. I can't tell you how many wives say, "My husband says he doesn't need any friends and I'm his only friend and I'm the only friend that he needs." Have you heard that before, Dave?

Dave Wilson: Yeah, I mean, we were talking earlier that thirty years of preaching, I bet I did a message or two a year on friendship or community and sort of "made for friendship, made for community." I remember a stat I tried to find years ago that there was a study done of American men and if I'm remembering it right it said nine out of ten American men say they do not have one true friend.

They have a lot of acquaintances, work buddies, and it's interesting. The study went on to say when they were boys they had friends, but as they grew into men and got involved in their lives and marriages and things, it's not something the average American. I don't know it compares to other men around the world, but in America we go, but often don't have a real, what we would call a real friendship. Did you find that as well?

Drew Hunter: Yeah. In fact I remember someone making a joke at one point when I was talking about friendship. He said, "Yeah, we have this newly found miracle of Jesus. He had 12 close friends in his thirties." Because it's just so rare. We have it early in life.

If you go to college, college can often be a pressure cooker for friendship because you have so many overlapping spheres of life where the people you go to church with or are in ministry with or have class with or your where you live, they overlap. And then we get out of college and then we move around and there's so many factors that lead to it, but we end up friendless.

A lot of studies are showing those kinds of statistics where they'll just interview a lot of people and find out that Cigna Health Insurance did a study a number of years ago and they found that half of people would say that their relationships aren't really meaningful to them. Something like 40 percent said that no one really knows them at all, which is another way of saying they don't actually have a friend, right? Or even a family member they consider that close. So 40 percent are saying candidly, "No one really knows me."

Dave Wilson: We are, you tell me because you just wrote about this, are we living in one of the loneliest times in history?

Drew Hunter: I think so, and I think others can point to that and I think studies would show that. What's really unique about this, though, is that we are in some ways the most connected generation ever with our devices. Social media and the internet and ways of connecting over text messages and phone calls, people have never been able to connect this quickly with this many people. And yet we are the most disconnected generation as well.

So we're the most connected-disconnected generation because studies are showing we don't actually have real life-on-life, face-to-face, heart-on-heart, soul-on-soul friendships. So we're in a really unique position right now.

Ann Wilson: So why is it important? Teach us. You've done all this study and I think wives are like, "This is important and I want my husband to hear it." Why?

Dave Wilson: Wait, why are we talking just about my husband to hear it? You don't think women need to hear it as well?

Ann Wilson: Yeah I think we do too and I think women are lonelier than they have been in the past too. And we all get so busy that we're taking care of our kids, we're going to church, we're in our jobs, and we think, "Do we have enough time for friends?" I'm just talking about the women that I know and talk to. They feel bad for their husbands, so I'm going to hit the husbands a little bit.

Dave Wilson: Okay, hit the husbands.

Drew Hunter: Yeah it certainly is an issue for both genders and in different ages and spheres of life. So there's a lot of angles that you can look at friendship to see our need for it. If you just start at page one of the Bible you see our need for it. God creates this wonder world and he creates these different realms of sky, land, sea, fills it with communal life.

He gets to the sixth day and creates humanity, and he makes humanity in his image. And then they're called to go fill the world with communal fruitful life. That's the commission for Adam and Eve to do, to fill the world with human society and friendship. But what's interesting in those first pages of the Bible is that God says he makes humanity in his own image and he speaks of himself in the plural: "Let us make man in our image."

Now we don't explicitly see the Trinity there, but we see that God is a plurality and it doesn't take long reading the Bible we find out Father, Son, and Spirit have made humanity in the image then of a triune God. So before there was creation or any men or women, there was God—Father, Son, and Spirit—as an eternal fellowship of love.

And so God, Richard Sibbes, the Puritan, put it this way, he said that God has a spreading goodness. He spreads his goodness, which means he didn't create anything because he had a lack or a need, but because he wanted to share the fullness of his life and blessing.

And so he creates humanity in his image, the image of a communal God, not because he needed us, but because he wanted to bless us. One of the blessings is to be made in the image of a God who loves fellowship and community, this triune God of love. Humanity's made with this need to experience the fullness of joy in community with God and with one another.

So we see that just on page one. And then even in chapter two, chapter two rewinds into the sixth day of creation to talk about how that actually happened. When you read the first story of creation in Genesis 1, you see that God made humanity, Adam and Eve, everything's very good. And then Genesis 2 rewinds into that day and then shows the process. He started with Adam. So he started just with one, and then Eve's not made yet.

He says of Adam, "It is not good that man should be alone." And so what's so striking about that is that so far we've just heard everything's good, good, good, very good. And then now we rewind back into the sixth day and realize that there's a moment when something was not good. So he makes Eve not just as a spouse but as a friend and to create a world of friendship.

What's also interesting here is that Adam hasn't sinned yet. So the first problem in human history that God solves is that of companionship and friendship before sin's even here. It's not good that man should be alone. That's a strong statement for why we need friendship. We're made in the image of a God of love, we're made for friendship, God himself says it's not good to be alone.

And then you can go from there and see all the problems that happen when we are alone. Proverbs says that the one who isolates himself breaks out against all understanding and reason. We see what happens when people are put in solitary confinement. That's just a little picture of what we're all experiencing when we are lonely and isolated in life.

Ann Wilson: The thing that I was thinking too as you were talking, Drew, was just scripture. How God, as he talks about his people, the Israelites, the Sabbath, the Shabbat is always together with people. He has so many celebrations that people are together. Food—when we eat, there's this beauty of when we come together and we eat, it's good for our souls. And I think that that's demonstrated in the scriptures.

Dave Wilson: One of the things I've done every year is fast. I used to do like a two-week fast before Easter. What are you laughing about?

Ann Wilson: I think I know where you're going with this.

Dave Wilson: I don't know if you know where I'm going. What made me think of it is when you said eating with people is something you enjoy. One of the hardest things about fasting is that goes away. I mean I can sit at a table with people who are eating and I'm really mad at them because they're eating and I'm not.

But most of the time you don't sit down with people during that fast, which is obviously different, you're doing a spiritual discipline, but I never thought of that when I first said I'm going to fast, that I'm going to miss community and God has hard-wired every human being to long for and need community.

Ann Wilson: That's why I was laughing because I thought, "I love it when you fast, but I also hate it because it's no fun. We can't eat together."

Drew Hunter: You know what's interesting about that is when you fast from food you end up appreciating food more, right? And appreciating people. And I think God has made food partly for the sake of friendship and community. You can make a biblical case for that.

But what's interesting too is I was reading a book the past couple weeks on just the way that the digital world has influenced us and technology and social media and our addiction to our phones and all these things. And I was really surprised about one part of his book where he talked about solitude being really important. And it was actually important for friendship and community.

It was surprising because we wouldn't think that. It's like, "Well, be around people." And he said actually we need solitude and we don't have solitude anymore because our minds—it's not just being alone, it's giving space for your minds to not be occupied doing something. Even checking your phone, checking your mail, checking the news, checking social media. Our mind no longer has the opportunity to just relax and do what it does when it doesn't have things going on like it has for human history.

He said when—and there's studies that show this about even what's going on in the brain—when your mind doesn't have a task to do, it defaults into using a part of your brain that thinks socially. And it's even measured in infants. So this is just hard-wired. Our mind defaults to think about our relationships.

I thought that's so interesting because recently I'll go out on my deck and just sit there by myself on some evenings or make a fire.

Dave Wilson: Wait, you've got four boys and you get to sit on a deck by yourself?

Drew Hunter: It's at nine at night. It's already dark and I'm exhausted, so I'll go there for a little bit. And then I'll make a fire and I start thinking about friendships and actually valuing them more. That's the point in this book, actually, is that our digital addictions are making friendships worse not just because we're spending time away from friends kind of connecting in superficial ways, but because we don't have time for solitude where we actually think about our relationships and value them more.

So I inevitably find myself calling a friend or just thinking about my friends and valuing them when I am alone. So there is a balance we need. And actually solitude can help us engage with friends, not just being alone with our phone but actually reflecting on life. And so perhaps one of our lacks of friendship in life is partly because we don't even have this space anymore in this culture to think about what's valuable, what's important in life, what do I want to spend my time doing.

Dave Wilson: You know, before we continue, let me just say this to the listener. At FamilyLife, we really believe strong families can change the world. And when you become a FamilyLife partner, you help make that happen.

Ann Wilson: And I don't know if you realize this, but your monthly gift helps us equip marriages and families with biblical tools that they can count on.

Dave Wilson: That's a pretty good deal. And we also want to send you exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes access, and an invitation to our private partner community, which is pretty cool. So join us and let's reach families and marriages together. And you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click the donate button to join today.

Since I left the pastorate, for thirty years Ann has heard me say this. It's like, "Wow, I'm lonelier now than I've ever been." And it's a sense that I don't go to like we used to go to the office every day and there's all these staff and people around and there's the other side. It's like, "I don't want to be around any of these people. They bug me and I bug them."

But you're around people every day. And now we're in a world that's a little different, that a lot of what Ann and I do is alone. And we have each other, which is awesome, but I'm not around as many men as I used to be. So how do you, like a guy like me or even, I mean you're in a different stage of life so you're probably around people a lot and you're sort of like I was like I want to get away for the solitude. But if you're a person that doesn't have a lot of friendships, man or woman, how would you encourage them? How do you develop that?

Drew Hunter: There's a lot of things that you can do. One of the things is just making sure you do value it properly and just recognize this is a non-negotiable in life. So seeing that work is important, family's important if you have one, certainly marriage should be your best friend, best friendship, but not your only friend. So just recognizing that you need to make it a non-negotiable and then building in space for it.

There's a lot of things you can do. One of the things you can do is schedule it. Just think about the non-negotiables in life. Everyone has them. Eating, for some people exercising, reading the Bible and prayer, work, eating as a family. If those things are important, you build your life around them. You have predictable rhythms and times that you do them.

And so friendship I think should be just put into our calendars like that too. So there's a lot of ways you can do it. My wife and I will often have seasons where we just reserve one evening a week like a Wednesday or Thursday for we just put hospitality on our calendar and just we're going to invite people over and spend time and we just have that reserved for people to be in our home either for dinner, although in our family life it's a bit crazier now so we wait until a little bit later for dessert or drinks or something afterward.

Or you can say lunch during my work week I'm going to have lunch with this person every week, or you just have it open and just with someone and you just know on Mondays I have lunch with a friend and then you schedule it that way. I have coffee every other week with a friend of mine at about 3:30 on Tuesdays right now and that's where we spend time getting together throughout the weeks and have a lot of conversations in everyday life, but we've just made sure to reserve that time to make sure we're talking openly and honestly about struggles in life, challenges in life, things we're encouraged about, confessing sin to one another, all of those things. So scheduling it I think is a huge one.

Dave Wilson: As you say that I think how often does the typical guy, and I don't know if women feel the same way, we've I've said this: "I've got to work out. I've got to get three workouts, four workouts in a week." I don't think I've ever said, "I've got to meet with a buddy." And it's like you said, we're made for friendship, so it's that important.

Ann Wilson: I have thought that, Dave, because I know for my emotional well-being and spiritual well-being I need to be with my friends. I have to have somebody besides you that knows everything about me. That I can be incredibly vulnerable with, I can tell them secrets, I can tell them things that I'm struggling with, I can tell them how I'm frustrated with Dave and they're going to pray.

Dave Wilson: I even told her one year I said, "Go ahead, tell them how much of an idiot I am." You said that. "He's the best. You don't have to cover it up." I'm like, "So you're saying you're the pastor of the church and you're saying I can tell my friends anything?" He goes, "Yep, you can just go ahead and tell them." I thought that was incredibly humble of you. What about married couples? Do you think they need other married couples as friends?

Drew Hunter: Yes, or just even I think married other married couples yes and even just the man having other friends that are men and the women having other friends that are women. I think both and. It's really important.

I know that some people get married and I've heard plenty of stories where both people will have friends who then get really hurt because they're just cut out of life because the couple gets married and then they put all of their friendship into that marriage. And then other people are hurt by that.

And then something happens down the road and the marriage ends for all sorts of reasons and eventually death. As long as it might be a sobering thought, but unless the couple both the Lord takes them at the same time, one of them's going to be unmarried again. And that's devastating if you have no other friends.

It's not the way it was supposed to be. We're supposed to enjoy rich friendship. I think even having other friends, both couples and even just men having other men as friends and women having other women as friends, strengthens the marriage. Christina and I have a stronger marriage because we also have our friendships that we even free each other up for. Because I'm a better man and a better husband and a better father because I have friends that help me become a better man and husband and father. And she grows from her friendships as well. And so we bring that to our marriage. And then we of course can enjoy other couples together as well if it fits.

Dave Wilson: Drew, I was thinking end this conversation this way. There's a guy listening, husband, dad, and of course it could be a woman as well, but I'm thinking of the guy that's saying, "I agree. In fact Drew's convinced me today this is the theology of friendship is real, it's scriptural, I need to have friends in my life. I really don't have any. What do I do?" What would you tell him to do?

Drew Hunter: A couple things. One, ask God for friends. Pray. The Lord made you for friends. He orders everyone's lives. He can bring friends into your life. So just pray and ask the Lord, "Would you bring me a friend? You made me for this, I need this, please help."

And then I would say focus not so much on finding a friend, but on being a good friend. So as you're around people, just open up conversation, focus on them, ask questions, love people well, be interested, be an encourager rather than a critical person. That keeps people from even wanting to be your friends. Don't be a gossip. All the things of basic follow Jesus, become like him, and be a good friend to people, and then pray that the Lord would use that to bring friends into your life. So that's different than "I'm going to do this on my own and I'm going to get a good friend. I'm looking for people that are good friends for me." That just won't work.

Ann Wilson: I like that advice because especially with women, I've talked to women, they're saying, "Nobody will be my friend." But I like what you said and even when I read that of like, "Become a good friend. Become someone that's loving people, praying for them, how can I pray for you?" Start there and pray.

Dave Wilson: It's easy to be the victim. Even when I would preach on this I would think there's some people thinking, "Well nobody's ever reached out to me." It's like, "You know what? You reach out. You initiate and God will answer that prayer."

Ann Wilson: This is FamilyLife Today and what did you think about that with Drew Hunter?

Dave Wilson: Great stuff. And by the way you want to get his book. It's called Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys. And that is exactly what you experience with real friendship.

Ann Wilson: Oh and it's so important. So yeah, go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click on the link in the show notes to buy that book. And we're going to have Drew back with us tomorrow. We would love to pray for you. I would personally love to pray for you and we even have a team at FamilyLife that can pray for you. Just go to FamilyLife.com/prayforme. FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.