Accidental Friendships

One day back in high school, I boarded the bus with my youth group and settled in for a long trip. My seat partner was a sophomore whose parents had decided she needed “church friends.” Being ordered to spend a week on the beaches of Florida would usually be okay, but a larger issue clouded this trip: my new friend had been told who her friends should (and would) be.

Such relational tyranny offends the ears of a “free society”: our ancestors fought wars for the freedom of association, among other things. But even if we can pick our friends, a pure freedom of association does not exist. We are stuck in this time and place, and we have to make do with the people here with us. I can’t make friends with Moses, for example. The Internet ­doesn’t eliminate these boundaries; I can’t form a virtual friendship with someone who doesn’t have Internet access any more conveniently than I can be pen pals with someone who can’t read.

I didn’t meet every neighbor before moving into my neighborhood; I didn’t interview every co-worker before taking the job offered me; I selected my church without much thought about who sits in the congregation. And yet, my neighborhood, my job and my church (among other social networks) all place me in accidental relationships. The question becomes not “Which relationships will I pursue?” but “How will I conduct myself in my relationships?”

The Bible tells us it is not good for us to be alone, and so we are not alone. God made more than one of us. The way of creation is telling: God created first one and then the other. Adam had to welcome Eve, and Eve had to approach Adam. They had to cultivate a climate of friendship, which involved both hospitality (a welcoming of others) and incarnation (entering the reality of others). Neither one, whether we are outside looking in or inside looking out, is an easy task. Either way we find ourselves suddenly grafted to the same tree.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood the fragile nature relationships. In his book Life Together, he wrote, “The serious Christian . . . is likely to bring . . . a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

In other words, to get to rightly ordered human relationships, get over yourself and the people around you. We will be hurt by others, and we will hurt others. But moving from accidental co-existence to accidental friendship requires the willingness to enter into this give-and-take in full awareness of both our failings and the failings of our potential friends.

My seat partner and I finished that trip to Florida as friends, and she kept coming back to church with us more aware that accidental friendships are hard to come by and hard to maintain. The emphasis lies first on the climate we set: whether we are willing to risk rejection as we place ourselves into the reality of others, and second, on whether we are willing to make room in our reality for the sudden entrance of others. Either way it’s hard, but either way it’s worth the effort.

—David Zimmerman is a graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University and an assistant editor at InterVarsity Press.