As a high school teacher, I hear some pretty sweet gossip. Sure, they usually frame it as concern for their friends, but what it really is is rumor-mongering. Because they don’t actually want me to do anything. And they don’t really want advice. What they want to do is voice their concerns about their friends in a way that poses absolutely no threat to them. And so they come to me, they pour out their hearts about all the bad things everybody else is doing (concealing, of course, how drunk they were when all this happened), and they go away satisfied. “I want to help,” they think. “I really do. But there’s nothing I can do.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—about how so many of these kids can want to be good and so few feel strong enough to do it. It’s because they don’t have any real friends. Sore, they’ve got plenty of people who’ll stay up all night laughing with them. They may even have a few who’ll stay up all night crying with them. But they don’t have anyone with the guts to make them cry.
The world tells us real friends don’t make us cry. Real friends are super-awesome and really fun and never judge ever no matter what. I typed “best friend” into Pinterest for proof, and check out what I got:
Oh, that’s Christian friendship, right there. Best friends don’t help you stay sober, avoid drunken idiocy, and prevent alcohol poisoning, but they’ll carry your drunk butt home after you’ve made a fool of yourself. Best friends don’t help you process and forgive, they burn for revenge along with you. And nobody better call you out on whatever got you stuck in jail—bail me out or come with me, but don’t you tell me not to screw up.
You want to know why good people gossip? It’s because we don’t have the guts to be good friends. We know our friends are screwing up and we want them to do better but we’re too interested in our friendship and not interested enough in our friends.
That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? The reason we don’t call our friends out on their nonsense is because we’re afraid they’ll be mad. We tell ourselves that we don’t want to hurt their feelings, that we know it won’t help anyway, but really we just don’t want to lose the security and popularity of having that friend.
Think about it—don’t you have a few relationships like this? A friend who’s dating a loser and everybody knows it but nobody’s willing to say something to upset her? A friend who’s bordering on alcoholism but you don’t want to judge? I know I do. I claim to love my friends but I’m not willing even to risk being awkward to save their reputations, their lives, their souls. What kind of love is that?
Jesus tells us that the greatest love we can have is to lay down our lives for our friends (Jn 15:13). And then he puts his money where his mouth is. He embraces his cross with joy because he would rather die than spend eternity without you. And it’s a sweet image, isn’t it, this pristine Jesus hanging on the cross? We wash his body and put him up in our churches and talk about all those nice things he said to sinners. “Neither do I condemn you,” says sweet surfer Jesus with his kind eyes, and we shut the Bible before he tells the woman to sin no more. We make stained glass windows showing the love the Father has for his prodigal sons but we skip Matthew 23 entirely. Read it—the whole thing is pure condemnation. The man who is Love incarnate yelled at people and called them names—because he is love.
Jesus ate with tax collectors and prostitutes and even Pharisees. He loved them. Really loved them. Which meant that he wasn’t content to cover their sins with platitudes and let them go happily on their way to hell. He loved the woman at the well and so he pointed out her sin. He loved the Pharisees and so he called them a brood of vipers. Jesus loved them exactly as they were but he loved them too much to leave them that way. When we say love hurts, we don’t just mean that it hurts to love. We mean that sometimes what real love does is inflict pain—knowingly, intentionally—in order to heal.
Now, I’m not advocating that you go storming into your best friend’s favorite bar and flip over the tables. And I’m pretty sure that you’ll get arrested if you bring a whip to school for when people start sinning in the hallway. But consider for a minute: do you have a friend who needs some tough love? And are you really helping her by pretending everything’s okay?
If you have the guts to say something (after much prayer, of course, and with all the gentleness that the situation warrants), you’re probably going to suffer. A real friend will (hopefully) see that you’re speaking from love. But he may be furious. He may stop speaking to you. He may hate you forever.
But maybe he’ll change. Maybe he’ll see your point and try to be better. Maybe twenty years from now, he’ll thank you. Maybe you’ll find yourself in a real David-and-Jonathan kind of friendship where you love each other honestly and challenge each other to grow and in a hundred years we’ll list you together when we pray the Litany of Saints.
Or maybe not. You may lose your friendship and gain nothing. But you have to ask yourself: am I willing to suffer for this friend? Would I rather be lonely, knowing that I did my best to help her grow, than secure in a shallow, fake friendship?
Or am I content to sacrifice my friend in order to preserve my friendship? Because if you are, that’s not love at all.
This Christianity business is a lot messier than the greeting cards would make you think. Christmas was more manure than glowing baby. Easter was more creepy holes in the hands than pretty white lilies. And real friendship is sometimes more about tears and discomfort than about hugs and laughter.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have a phone call to make.