Spiritual Friendship

In February 2020, BBC journalist Vicky Baker jumped on the Eurostar to Paris, motivated by a sudden urge to have dinner with a friend. American Jim Haynes had entered his late 80s and his health was declining, yet she knew he would welcome a visit. Jim always welcomed visitors to his home in Paris.

She was far from the only guest wandering into the warm glow of his artist's workroom on a wet winter's night. Inside, people were squeezing, shoulder to shoulder, through the narrow kitchen. Strangers struck up conversations, bunched together in groups, and balancing their dinners on paper plates.

Jim had operated open-house policy at his home every Sunday evening for more than 40 years. Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive.

There would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities - locals, immigrants, travelers - milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the stove and servings would be dished out onto a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle. It was for good reason that Jim was nicknamed the "godfather of social networking." He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley.

At the dinners' peak, Jim would welcome up to 120 guests, filling his home, and spilling out into the cobbled back garden. An estimated 150,000 people have come over the years.

"The door was always open," says Amanda Morrow, an Australian journalist. "It was a revolving door of guests - some who wanted to stay over, and others who just wanted to say hello. Jim never said no to anyone."

Amid the outpouring of online tributes since his death in his sleep on 6 January 2021, these words from his son Jesper stand out:

The only thing that really got Jim down was people leaving. He struggled with that. He didn't like being on his own... His goal from early on was to introduce the whole world to each other. He almost succeeded.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Fellowship; Home; Outreach – Imagine the results if church members would invite others to share in an informal meal at their home. Neighbors, friends, church members, visitors to church all welcomed to mingle and fellowship in the warm, cozy atmosphere of a home.

Shifrah Combiths, a freelance writer and mother-of-five in Tallahassee, Florida, wrote about a baking hack for the website The Kitchn that was so valuable it was picked up overseas by the British tabloid The Mirror.

Combiths had a mom who used to love eating the last slice of bread in a loaf, often referred to as “the heel.” (“Save the heel for me,” her mom was fond of saying.) Later in life, Combiths was surprised to find out that her mom’s enthusiasm for the final slice of bread was a bit unusual. So, her tip is for people who don’t enjoy eating the heel.

“It’s simple,” she writes. “Use that heel of bread to keep your soft, homemade cookies, well, soft … cookies that are supposed to be soft and chewy are disappointing when they become crunchy and stale!”

Combiths says the hack works because the moisture in the bread, when in close contact with the cookies, will eventually transfer over. She even says it can be a last resort to restore some chewiness to already-hardened cookies.

“Use this cookie-saving tip when you make big batches — or you need to make baked treats the night before a gathering of friends and family.”

Combiths does offer a brief warning, however. “It’s crucial to ensure the bread is plain,” she says. “Unless you want garlic-flavored cookies.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The love of God has the power to influence others. For maximum effectiveness, remain close to God and watch his love spill over to the people in your immediate circle of relationship.

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.

That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. The housing crisis is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.

According to surveys in 2015 and 2016 by the National Association of Home Builders, 86 percent of households want a combined kitchen and dining room—a preference accommodated by only 75 percent of new homes. If anything, the classic dining room isn’t dying fast enough for most people’s taste.

If dining space is merging with other rooms in single-family homes, it’s vanishing altogether from newly constructed apartments. Americans might not mind what’s happening to their houses, but the evolution of apartments is a more complicated story.

Floor-plan expert Bobby Fijan said “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone.

As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown. According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need for fellowship and human interaction. Make an effort to invite people over, especially during the holiday season, and especially those who live alone.

How many people do you know? You’ve probably never counted. Well, now you don’t have to. Tyler McCormick has worked it out: around 600.

Or more precisely 611, according to estimates by McCormick, a professor in the statistics and sociology departments at the University of Washington. That’s a national average, but McCormick can actually compute an estimate for you, or anyone.

Asked how many close friends they have, about half of Americans say three or fewer, according to a 2021 survey. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, drawing on studies of the brain sizes of humans and other primates, estimates a person can only maintain about 150 relationships. The so-called “Dunbar number,” he has said, “applies to quality relationships, not to acquaintances.” A Pew Research study found adults on Facebook had an average of 338 friends on the site.

The number of people you know, without considering them friends, is probably much larger. McCormick’s definition: “that you know them and they know you by sight or by name, that you could contact them, that they live within the United States, and that there has been some contact” in the past two years.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) As a negative illustration, this could show our need to develop deeper, more intimate friendships in the body of Christ. (2) As a positive illustration, this could reveal that our support system may be stronger and broader than we realize, especially in the church.

In 2023, an Australian man said that a chatbot had saved his life. He was a musician who had been battling depression for decades and found companionship with an AI through an app called Replika, and everything changed. He started playing the guitar again, went clothes shopping for the first time in years, spent hours conversing with his AI companion, and laughing out loud.

Though the musician felt less alone with his AI companion, his isolation from other people was unchanged. He was adamant that he had a real friendship, but understood clearly that no person was on the other side of his screen. The effect of this bond was extraordinary.

Replika, and other chatbots, have millions of active users. People turn to these apps for all sorts of reasons. They’re looking for attention and for reassurance. But the apps’ core experience is texting as you would with a buddy. They’re talking about the petty minutiae so fundamental to being alive: “Someone stole my yogurt from the office fridge;” “I had a weird dream;” “My dachshund seems sad.”

To Replika’s users, this feels a lot like friendship. In actuality, the relationship is more like the fantasized intimacy people feel with celebrities and influencers who carefully create desirable personae for our screens. These parasocial bonds are defined by their asymmetry—one side is almost totally ignorant of the other’s existence.

Jesse Fox, a communications professor at Ohio State University, said that if we continue relationships that seem consensual and reciprocal but are not, we risk carrying bad models of interaction into the real world. Fox is particularly concerned by the habits men form through sexual relationships with AIs who never say no. “We start thinking, ‘Oh, this is how women interact. This is how I should talk to and treat a woman.’”

Sometimes the shift is more subtle—researchers and parents alike have expressed concern that barking orders at devices such as Amazon’s Echo is conditioning children to become tiny dictators. Fox said, “When we are humanizing these things, we’re also, in a way, dehumanizing people.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Church; Fellowship; Friendship - This illustration highlights the wise exhortation of Scripture to “never neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another” (Heb. 10:25). God did not create us to be alone (Gen. 2:18) but to find fellowship, encouragement, and love in the company of others.

What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really matters to a person’s health and happiness? For 85 years (and counting), the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked about 2,000 men and women for three generations, asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements to find out what really keeps people healthy and happy.

Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. It isn’t career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. These things matter, but one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: good relationships

In fact, close personal connections are significant enough that if we had to take all 85 years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. If you want to make one decision to ensure your own health and happiness, it should be to cultivate warm relationships of all kinds.

New York Times columnist Kashana Cauley knows a little something about regrets. She wrote, “My friends and I got tattoos so we could feel dangerous. Not very dangerous, because very dangerous people went to jail, but slightly dangerous, like a thrilling drop of botulism in a jar of jelly.”

She explains in the piece that when it came time to select her first tattoo, she picked a design of Chinese characters that she was told meant “fame and fortune.” But then she had chat with an older Chinese-speaking woman in a university locker room when they were changing clothes.

“She asked me what I thought the Chinese characters on my shoulder meant, and I told her. Then she asked me what I was at school to study, and I said law. She frowned and told me the tattoo was better suited for someone in the arts — that I should hurry up and get into the arts. We both laughed.”

But Cauley thought it would be different when she got a tattoo of her own name. As an African American descended from slavery, her knowledge of family history doesn’t extend very far. But a friend told her once that her name meant something beautiful and significant in Arabic. As a result, she looked up an online Arabic translation of her name, and got that design as another tattoo.

And she was satisfied with her choice … until she wasn’t. “For a few years I walked around confident that I had finally restored some meaning to my name, until an Arabic-speaking friend spotted my tattoo at lunch. ‘What do you think it means?’ she asked.”

Her friend’s response surprised her. “Instead of complimenting me on the beautiful, permanent version of my name needled onto my arm, my Arabic-speaking friend paused. Apparently, tattoo No. 2 was actually one of those 404 error messages, when an online search comes up blank. So my arm said, more or less: ‘Result not found.’”

“As a reluctant pioneer in the field of bad tattooing, I spent years afterward stubbornly telling people it meant ‘the eternal search.’ It sounded more elegant than ‘I didn’t find a correct translation of my name on the internet.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can avoid embarrassing mishaps by asking for the counsel of others to help guide us through the major decisions we make.

U.S. cities were shedding people steadily even before the pandemic. According to Postal Service data, 15.9 million Americans filed a change-of-address request between February and July of 2020. Roughly one in five Americans either changed residences or know someone who did in just the first few months of the pandemic, according to Pew Research. Many of them were spurred—or enabled—by COVID-19 lockdowns, seeking more breathing room as homes morphed into places where work, school, meals, and rest all unfolded under one roof.

Though median U.S. home prices rose relatively steadily over the past decade, they soared during the pandemic, climbing 30 percent from early-2020 to early-2022. It seems we have collectively awakened to the fact that our homes really do matter. Except, it is harder than it has been in generations to actually find a home.

But for Christians, the broken housing market is more than just an opportunity to practice the virtue of contentment. With a dream home out of reach for so many, it may well be time for us, followers of the man who had no place to lay his head (Matt. 8:20) and to reimagine what the home is truly for.

The best homes—the ones that feel most like a home—are almost never the biggest, prettiest, cleanest, or most well organized. They are those that seem to envelop you upon crossing the threshold with signs of real, actual life: dishes in the sink and toys strewn on the floor, a stack of yet-to-be read books on a side table, furniture arranged to foster conversation, tea on the stove, and a “let me dig around and see what we have in the fridge” attitude that is neither fussy nor sterile. They are infused with an earnest Galatians 6:10, do-good-to-all-people mindset, and it shows. Homes are a place of growth and connection with ourselves, our spouses, our friends, and our communities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

And as we watch the world quiver under the weight of war and political discord and injustice, let’s be reminded that home isn’t found in the perfect house, but in the people that enter, the reflection of eternity it offers, the shelter it provides, and the growth and connection it creates. No matter the location, no matter the size, these things remain.

There is no evidence that poet and philosopher David Whyte is in any way a Christian, nor does he claim his thoughts are inspired from the Bible. But his insights on the theme of friendship makes him seem like he is cozy with godly values and biblical truths. Whyte emphasizes mercy and forgiveness in authentic friendships:

Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes. (It) can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses, as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities. ... Real friendship is a blessing because it is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

Just being with someone and having truly known them is a blessing and privilege. ... The importance of friendship is underestimated by most, and a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble.

Dr. Jeffrey Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas, published research about the relationship between time invested in a friendship and friendship closeness. In general, Hall found that it took 40-60 hours to form a casual friendship. Moving from casual friend to friend required between 80-100 hours, and moving from friend to good/best friend took between 160-200 hours. Time spent together was a key predictor of friendship closeness, but the type of activity mattered as well. For example, more time spent at work or in class together actually predicted lower closeness, but more time spent hanging out without an agenda predicted higher closeness.

The kind of talk friends engaged was also important. Small talk (about things like pets, sports, current events, TV/music/movies) predicted lower closeness over time. But striving talk (which Hall defined as “catching up by talking about events that have occurred since you last saw each other,” “Talking about what’s up/what happened to you during the day,” “Serious conversation where both of you are involved in the conversation,” “Playful talk to have fun or release tension,” or “Talking in ways that express love and give attention and affection”) predicted greater closeness.

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) Assimilation; Church; Small groups – Time and energy spent in meaningful conversation will help people become connected and have a sense of belonging in the group; 2) Prayer; Fellowship with God – Since closeness in a relationship requires time and deep conversation, then the same is true in our relationship with God.

When Hillary Harris learned the name of her next-door neighbor, it set off some mental alarm bells, and led to an unexpected family connection.

Having been raised in a loving adoptive family as a newborn, Harris has always been curious about her biological family, but that curiosity turned into necessity when she and her husband were expecting their first child. According to CBS News, Harris put in a request to unseal her adoption records in order to ascertain her family medical history.

"That had all my health history, it had a letter from my birth mother. … It also disclosed that my birth father Wayne had passed away in 2010," Harris said. "And then it had two half-sisters, Renee and Dawn … and then right here it says Dawn Johnson of Greenwood."

The following year, Harris and her husband Lance noticed they had new neighbors, and Lance went out to meet them.

"[Lance] comes in and is like, 'Yeah, I met the neighbor. Her name's Dawn.' … 'Dawn from Greenwood?' … Lance is like, 'Yeah.' I'm like, 'You don't get it?' He's like, 'What are you talking about?'" Harris recalled. "And I pulled out all my adoption paperwork. And I said, 'Dawn. Greenwood. Sister, you know?' And he's like, 'Oh my gosh.'"

Though 19 years apart, the two sisters have been busily catching up on lost time, ecstatic to have made such an unlikely connection. "That moment when I first embraced her in the driveway … I mean, it was amazing. It was a miracle," Harris said.

Potential Preaching Angle: Church; Body of Christ; Family of God—The church is a lot like that—we think we're living next to total strangers when in reality we are living next to our brothers and sisters.

It's no news flash that friends make us happy, but Meliksah Demir, Ph.D., a professor at Northern Arizona University, has drilled down to reveal exactly what about friendship warms our hearts. It turns out that companionship—simply doing things together—is the component of friendship that most makes us happy. And the reason friends make us happy, Demir has concluded, is that they make us feel that we matter.

It started with the word "phat."

Aspiring rapper and producer Spencer Sleyon, an African-American 22 year old from Harlem, was taken aback when his opponent on the mobile app Words with Friends played "phat" on her turn. His surprise was warranted, given that "phat" is 90s hip-hop slang, and his opponent was an 81-year-old white woman named Rosalind Guttman.

"From day one I knew I was playing an old white woman," Sleyon said. Nevertheless, he persisted. Over the summer of 2016, Sleyon and Guttman played more than 300 games of Words with Friends together. A chance meeting turned into a familiar rivalry, and eventually, into a friendship.

Though their pairing was initiated through a love of words, their real life encounter was facilitated through a practitioner of the Word. While Sleyon told his friend Hannah Butler about his budding friendship with Guttman, Hannah's mom Amy Butler, pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan, overheard. "I found it such a compelling story," Butler later recalled.

Inspired, Rev. Butler began scheming to orchestrate a meeting. After asking Sleyon to put her in touch with Guttman online, Rev. Butler traveled with Sleyon down to Florida to meet his Words with Friends friend face-to-face.

The three of them met in the lobby of a Palm Beach hotel, chatting like old friends. "We're living in a country divided by fear of the other, and people are longing for ways to connect," Butler said. "This story has two unlikely people becoming friends. It's very beautiful and hopeful."

Potential Preaching Angles: Bridging generations is possible when we focus on the Word. The power of friendship can make us more Christ-like. Passionate people from diverse backgrounds can bond when there's common ground.

Are your friends on Facebook actually your friends? According to an appeals court in Florida, "[l]egally, Facebook friends aren't necessarily your friends."

The court dove into this question because of a judge who may have been required to recuse herself from a case—because an attorney involved in that case was friends with the judge on Facebook. However, the court ruled that a recusal was not necessary, as "Facebook data mining and algorithms lead to people accepting friend requests from people they hardly know or who they are only acquainted with in professional circles."

This issue isn't quite finished yet, though, as a Palm Beach appeals court ruled differently on the "friend" definition—meaning "the question over the true meaning of social media friendship could eventually be decided by the Florida Supreme Court."

Potential Preaching Angles: Our cultural definition of "friend" may have expanded to include the acquaintances (and even near-strangers) we add on Facebook—but may we remember that a true, godly friend "sticks closer than a brother" (Prov. 18:24) and "loves at all times" (Prov. 17:17).

In her book Openness Unhindered, Rosaria Butterfield reminds us that the point of hospitality in the home is fellowship, not entertainment. Butterfield elaborates:

Don't let pride stop you from opening your home. Ignore the cat hair on the couch (or in the mac and cheese). It likely won't kill anyone as decisively as loneliness will. Add as much water to the pot to stretch the soup. If you run out of food, make pancakes, and put the kids in charge of making that meal. See how much fun that is.

And know that someone is spared from another humiliating fall into internet pornography because he is instead walking with you and your kids and dogs, as you share the Lord's Day, one model of how the Lord gives you daily grace and a way of escape. Know that someone is spared the fear and darkness of depression because she is needed at your house, always on the Lord's Day, the day she is never alone, but instead safely in community, where her place at the table is needed and necessary and relied upon. Know that someone is drawn into Christ's love because the Bible reading and psalm singing that come at the close of the meal include everyone, and that it reminds us that no one is scapegoated in this Christ-bearing community. Know that host and guest are equally precious and fragile, and that you will play both roles throughout the course of this life. The doors here open wide. They must.

A glass bottle washed up on the beach, a decades-old note inside: sounds a bit like a movie, right? For Clint Buffington, that situation turned into a reality.

Buffington found the bottle in question in 2011, while on a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands near the Bahamas. The note inside "contained a few clues: an address (419 Ocean); a name (Tina) … The words 'Return' and 'reward' eventually became more clear, too." Buffington—"an experienced message-in-a-bottle hunter"—eventually tracked down a potential contact by the name of Paula Pierce, whose mother Tina had been an owner of a motel on 419 Ocean Boulevard in Hampton, New Hampshire.

It wasn't until recently, however, that Buffington and Pierce finally met in person. Pierce, whose father is believed to have written the message, said it was "like being contacted from the past." "That gave me chills today," she said. "I actually started to cry."

And Buffington? "I've been really lucky that I have this thing that allows me to open the door and connect with people that I would never have any reason or right to connect with otherwise."

Potential Preaching Angles: What "message in a bottle" moments can we look for as we seek to connect with people? What doors can we open in order to foster relationships that may have never existed otherwise?

Few Americans today say they know their neighbors' names, and far fewer report interacting with them on a daily basis. Pulling data from the General Social Survey, a recent report found that a third said they've never interacted with their neighbors. And only about 20 percent of Americans spent time regularly with the people living next to them. That's a big drop from four decades ago, when a third of Americans hung out with their neighbors at least twice a week, and only a quarter reported no interaction at all.

Public Policy expert Marc Dunkelman noted, "There used to be this necessity to reach out and build bonds with people who lived nearby." Dunkelman added, "[From the 1920s to the 1960s] there was this sort of cohort effect, in which people … were more inclined in many cases to find security that existed in neighborhoods. They depended on one another much more." Little wonder that his book on this subject is titled The Vanishing Neighbor.

The New York Times featured an article exploring our current confusion about friendship. "Ask people to define friendship—even [experts who research friendship]—and you'll get an uncomfortable silence followed by "er" or "um."

"Friendship is difficult to describe," said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, who in his book, "On Friendship," spends almost 300 pages trying to do just that. "It's easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental." It is not a means to obtain higher status, wrangle an invitation to someone's vacation home, or simply escape your own boredom. Rather, Mr. Nehamas said, friendship is more like beauty or art, which … is "appreciated for its own sake."

Ronald Sharp, a professor who teaches a course on the literature of friendship added, "It's not about what someone can do for you, it's who and what the two of you become in each other's presence … The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other's company has, in a way, become a lost art. People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend."

In June of 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings author) wrote a letter to his editor Stanley Unwin explaining why he was behind schedule finishing the final draft for The Hobbit. Tolkien told Unwin that instead of drafting more material, he decided to start over and rewrite the first three chapters. What motivated Tolkien to go back and start the whole thing over again? He had received "excellent criticism" from his readers. C. S. Lewis was one of those readers. Apparently Lewis read chapters, liked the story, and encouraged Tolkien, but he also took the time to critique it and make specific suggestions for its improvement.

For instance, Lewis told Tolkien that there was too much dialogue, too much chatter, too much silly "hobbit talk." According to Lewis, all this dialogue was dragging down the story line. Tolkien grumbled in response to Lewis, "The trouble is that 'hobbit talk' amuses me … more than adventures; but I must curb this severely." But he still accepted the advice anyway.

Also, in the first draft, the story centers on a hobbit named Bingo, who sets out with two companions (Odo Took and Frodo Took). As Tolkien revises, Bingo becomes Frodo, and he is joined by his friends Sam and Pippin. (I wonder—would The Lord of the Rings have been nearly so popular if the main character had been called Bingo all along?)

But more than just names have been transformed. Tolkien's revised version is shorter and much clearer, too. When Tolkien rewrote this material, he cut nearly half of the dialogue. Page after page, he cuts out long conversations, and he picks up the action. Even though he personally prefers a story with much more "hobbit talk," he bows to his critics and creates a tale with much less. He also makes small but elegant refinements throughout the pages.

In an article having to do with the socializing of Supreme Court justices Justice Scalia shared some of his wisdom: Ruth Bader Ginsburg fondly recalled her closest friend on the court, who always gave her roses on her birthday and shared her reverence for the law. Scalia was once asked, she told the audience, how they could be such dear friends with such different views. Justice Scalia answered, "I attack ideas. I don't attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. If you can't separate the two, you'd better get another job."