This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?”
The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?”
The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?”
And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.”
The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and know the way out.”
Two days ago, my five-year-old told me that he often plays by himself at recess. “No one wants to play with me,” he said, “so I just run around, and I’m lonely.”
Insert here the sound of my heart-shattering.
Every parent fears deep down that they will pass on the parts of themselves that they like least to their child. One of the first prayers I remember praying over my son before he was born was short and simple and gutting to say aloud,
“Lord, please don’t let him wrestle like I do.”
I was terrified, and at times still am, that the darkest parts of my mind, the ones I vacillate between standing victorious over and cowering beneath, would be handed down like the world’s worst inheritance. And so when the word "lonely” came out of his mouth, and his little eyes cut away to stare into everything and nothing at once, my breath caught.
I didn’t make friends very easily as a kid. I don’t know if it was my stature or my sensibilities; a freshman in high school weighing in at eighty-something pounds who would rather read his father’s 1917 edition of “Forty Thousand Quote and Quotations” than watch baseball wasn’t running away with the homecoming vote. The length and depth of my loneliness is a subject for another time, as is the anxiety that grew as a result of it and the incomprehensible actions of a boy who just wanted to be loved. Then again, maybe they are not subjects for another time. Perhaps they are just memories for me, precursors to a moment when a friend walked by, saw me in a pit, and decided to jump down into it.
You see, life is generally lonely until we find another lonely soul and, like a five-year-old, reach out with unearned confidence to grab their similarly outstretched hand. Then we find another and another. Life may be lonely, but love is not.
About this kind of love let me just say this: it is far better to be fully known by 15 people than it is to be adored from a distance by 5000. You have about 15 seats in your soul, men and women who have an honored position in your life to speak to the innermost part of you with correction, wisdom, or affirmation. You get to decide who those people are, and they aren’t appointed for life. You will sometimes need to let someone go if they can no longer be trusted, and that will be a grieving process. Grief is healthy, and so is carefully curating the advisors of your soul. Here is a beautiful truth I have learned through this process: every time I have had to make this choice, God has been faithful to fill what I saw as a gap and to remind me of his ability to provide for my every emotional need. Too often, we have invited people to our table out of a selfish desire to take something we believe they can give us. Sometimes this is unintentional; other times, we know what we are doing the whole time. But a friendship based on perpetual emotional theft is no friendship at all.
True friendship is one selfless act after another, a relationship of sacrificial generosity. True friendship will save your life, as it has mine, when you are strong enough to admit you need help and when you are cowering in fear beneath the assaults of life. I have made those phone calls with clammy hands and a heart rate that won’t come down, and I have wept into the shirts of men whose blood is not my own, and yet we are brothers still. None of these people needed me to hold it together or pretend to be perfect because they had long known my weaknesses before they were on display, and I knew theirs. Because we made a choice with each other to be fully, not conditionally, known.
My son is five years old, and you may think that to fully know him would just be asking him which color lightsaber he would prefer or which Braves player he is pretending to be each night as we run around the living room but to do so would be wrong. I see already in his eyes that large crowds make him uncomfortable unless he’s holding my hand and the anxiety that hides under the surface when he knows that his parents have to travel for work in a few days. There are moments where his cackle fades and he asks me if I miss my grandparents, and then wants to call his own because he can tell already that there is sadness in me that I can’t do the same. But he also asks me about my friends, and he watches as they come over just to talk about life. It is no accident that I miss his bedtime each time they do and that he sits on the fireplace just long after he should be curled up in bed so that he can watch and listen as we share, laugh, and maybe even cry.
I want him to know what I wish I could have told that eighty-pound boy twenty years ago that he didn’t find in a book full of speeches and quotes: that loneliness doesn’t have to be our default state. Our world focuses on the kind of disciplines that build companies, keep us in shape, and hone our abilities, but we can set that same kind of mindset on cultivating our friendships. Send the text today. Better yet, make the call. I love the story we started with today, because most of us default to identifying with the guy who fell into the pit, but you know what, maybe it’s actually time for you to be the friend who jumps in and shows them the way out.