Friends of Your Sparked Mission

In post-earthquake Haiti, sitting across from tent cities, fresh from my current favorite village in the rolling hills of this beautiful country, looking around the table at the small band of usually-disconnected travelers, I was pondering friendships.

I knew that these people were friends, but I did not know ‘about’ them. I did not know their complete histories. I had not spent years and years in relationship with them. But we had just spent time serving our Haitian friends together, and I knew that we were friends, and that our bond was firm.

Somewhere in my mind I thought it sounded familiar, like I had read about friendships like these but I could not recall at that time.

Last night, watching television with a group of people I was slightly more familiar with, the thought of friendships hit me again. Yes, they are friends, but they were definitely a different category of friends.

I had been back from Haiti about a week, trying to make time for the next trip to help our Haitian partners, trying to take time to write, trying to push the mission forward. I had paused to take time for this group of friends. I began pondering what determined the types of friends we kept.

Why are we choosing to spend time with the people we do?
If our desire is to live a successful and significant life, are the people we are spending time with adding to those goals?

I began to think about phrases we use to describe a group of friends.
Birds of a feather…A chord of three strands…Band of brothers…Foxhole friends…

Then I began to think of historically significant groups of friends. No one does anything in a void. No one lives a life of significance without relating to someone.

The founding fathers were friends,..of sorts. So were the Greek philosophers. So were the leaders of the New Thought movement and the major industrialists.

My two favorite friends, however, are C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Then it struck me. We can better understand our friends and our ways of relating to them through Lewis’ ‘The Four Loves’.

Storge. Eros. Agape. Phileo.

We can better understand the differing degrees of satisfaction we are experiencing through the four greek words for love. My assumption here is that we are all operating out of ‘agape’ for our neighbor.

Beyond that, I realized that most of the friends we have day to day are ‘storge’ friends. We appreciate them. They are friends who we are with because we are familiar with them, we are comfortable with them. We are used to them being there. We do not even know any more if they are ‘our type of person’ or passionate about the same things, but we are so used to their presence that they bring us comfort.

Most of the friends that we are accomplishing things with are ‘phileo’ friends. These are friends who we may not always be comfortable with. In act, they may even piss us off. But they are driving in the same direction, even if only for this season. They are friends we choose despite whether or not they comfort us. Since we generally choose them, we let them drive us harder into the mission. We may not know their middle name, or their shoe size, they may stink.

I think of the time on Semester at Sea when our ship was about to sink and we were huddled in the hallway. That guy next to me had in fact peed in his pants from fear, and we could smell it, but he was helping the girl in the wheelchair toward the lifeboats. Foxhole friends.

The question is, would you rather find yourself running with people that make you comfortable, or people that may make you uncomfortable but you accomplish things with?

On today’s playing field, with the needs that arise from the complacent masses, to truly serve our low man, we need to accomplish lots of things, and now. To serve Haiti, we have many things to accomplish and now. If not, people die of hunger and exposure.

I choose the uncomfortable daily. Do you?

Tagged as: agape, Community, Eros, friend, friendship, mission, people, philanthropy, phileo, Sparking, storge