A Letter to the Christian Soldiers

I am writing you this letter to help you fight the Evil One for he has come to steal, kill, and destroy. There are several weapons we have in our arsenal but I want to focus on one that has been pushed aside and trivialized in our days. The Evil-One is very cunning! He is systematically trying to minimize all the weapons we have so that our defenses are unable to hold off the continual assault. I am speaking of Friendship. A Friend is, according to Webster, a person one knows well and likes or an ally. How do you categorize your friends? Do they really know you well? Do they know your strengths and weaknesses? Do they know your story? Will they protect you and watch out for your safety? The modern day friend is not even one of these let alone all of them.

Where has friendship gone in our era? Famous author and fellow Christian C.S. Lewis regarded Friendship so highly that he includes it as one of "The Four Loves". He writes "To the ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

C.S. Lewis wrote this over 40 years ago and I am saddened by the feeling that Friendship is even more lost today than it was for his generation. At best our "Friends" have become people we like and have a common interest with. Usually, they are people we use for one reason or another. Maybe they make us laugh or listen to our complaints. We outright avoid discussing critical topics so that we don't argue, disagree, or hurt someone's feelings. It's impossible to have a true "Friend" or be a true "Friend" when we spend most of our time changing our personality, like a chameleon, to adapt to the audience. Humans adapt very well to almost any situation by pretending to be the person that they believe everyone else wants them to be. We all work very hard to accumulate buddies or companions but these are rarely real Friends. Popularity and pleasing others are the common themes of our relationships. Why don't we think Friendship is important? I agree with C.S. Lewis, few value it because few experience it.

The hardest part about a Friendship is...

Storge: affection

Philia: friendship

Eros: sexual love

Agape: selfless love

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