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Had a good time meeting with James and Rob at Barnes & Noble earlier. We get together for our weekly Bible study / man time most every Tuesday evening. We’re going through 1 Corinthians but the topics we discuss range far and wide. James is something of a renaissance man, interest-wise: intimidatingly well-read, good bead on philosophy and history, great taste in movies, science fiction, a computer whiz, and the list goes on… Rob and his wife and son are leaving around the beginning of next year for Egypt, to be missionaries. He’s a seminarian with a firmly Biblical grasp of all things theological and a winsome manner of expressing the basics of our emphasis as Christians. So during our weekly meetings, while I’m completely outclassed knowledge-wise, conversations are always a lot of fun.

I really get the sense that these are guys I’ll be friends with for a while. Rob points out, correctly, that when married and especially with kids, friendships become more of a discipline than a spontaneous occurrence. That is to say, it takes planning to arrange get-together, in contrast to the lack of premeditation that ruled the day before married life happened. I keep trying to imagine my life right now with respect to the only point of reference I have: my parents. I think about the lifelong friendships they’ve maintained and often wonder about the sequence of circumstances that made certain friendships thrive while others withered. And I can’t really put my finger on it since I’m not them, and chances are they couldn’t remember anyway if I asked them; they’d just say “Oh I don’t know; we just kept in touch.” It’s like trying to predict the weather or the stock market to a certain degree–sometimes (all the time?) you just don’t know what God has in store just around the corner.

But that doesn’t obviate the need to be intentional about friendships, and it doesn’t stop me from trying to figure out the alchemy of their longevity by mining the past. Was it a particular convergence of personalities with my parents and their friends? Perhaps–they all fill different “roles” when they come together as a group and complement each other without any obvious “gaps,” but that could just be my perception–I grew up with them as a baseline, not knowing anything else. Could it be similar social / church circles? Not likely–several families went to different churches and were involved in different community structures, so there was no help from that arena. Similar life situations? Maybe–all us kids are roughly the same age, so I’m sure they profited from a convenient common conversational vantage point. But there are so many couples in our social circles that we could describe as being in the same “life situation” with whom we don’t pursue long-term friendships. The more I think about my parents’ circle of old friends, the more I’m convinced that at some point, by all parties, the decision just got made, whether spoken or tacit: “Yep, this is it.” And from then on, although all of the couples certainly branched out with other friends, it seemed they always reserved a measure of their intentionality for each other. And meetups would regularly occur, as they do now once a year on New Year’s Day, just a few weeks away. Thinking about it, how rare is it that all four or five couples would decide to be intentional about maintaining a long-term friendship with each other in this day and age? How many friendships between two people survive the inevitable misunderstandings, hurt feelings and disappointments, let alone five couples? My parents and their friends are amazingly blessed, and I would count myself blessed to be able to follow their example in that manner. I certainly intend to try.