A few days ago I wrote about the "loyal critics" each of us have, those people who live to tear down our ideas, words, us. The loyal critic is always around, showing up everytime we put ourselves out there. But today I'm writing about a different type of loyalty, the loyalty that one assumes is inherent in friendship. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case.
My dad told me a long time ago that the deeper I moved into life, the fewer true friends I would have. As with so many things he told me when I was young and knew everything, I didn't think this would apply to me. And, as with pretty much everything else he told me then, time has proven him to be right. Because of this, I place a very high value on friendship, knowing that it is something I share with only a handful of people. This is not a bad thing...it's just the way life is.
But, for each of us who place that high value on friendship, who know what it means to be a friend and to have a friend, we both know and expect that loyalty is at the heart of those friend relationships. I'm not talking about some blind acceptance of anything and everything a friend says or does. Instead, I'm talking about the willingness to stand with our friends no matter what they're going through, even if while we stand with them we're having to tell them how they messed up and what they need to do to clean up their mess.
I want and need those types of friends. Thank God I have them. But every once-in-a-while, something comes my way that thins the friendship herd, some sort of difficulty that causes me to see that I've misjudged someone's loyalty and commitment to our friendship. We have all had friends of convenience at some time. When it becomes clear to us that it is now inconvenient for that person to remain our friend, we often wonder about their disloyalty, and sometimes we're even shocked by it. More often that not, though, if we had only paid attention to things prior to the crisis, we would have seen the obvious: that this is not a person who is in for the long-haul, when it is no longer convenient to be your friend, they will be gone.
So, what do we do with this, knowing that disloyalty will continue to present itself in friend relationships? For some, shutting down the possibility of friendship with anyone and everyone is the answer, an alternative that I believe most of us see as no alternative. Instead, in the face of this kind of disloyalty I think we are best served to remind ourselves of who remains with us. While we feel the pain of the lack of loyalty by one, how many others still stand with us, proving once again that they are in fact in it for the long-haul? Maybe in the end, the disloyalty done to us is actually a gift, reminding us of the preciousness of the loyalty that remains.
Nothing I have written here is new or profound. But hopefully for some of us these words are a helpful reminder of who continues on the journey with us, who remains loyal not to a fault, but to our ultimate benefit, even when they are the ones having to tell us the inconvenient truth about ourselves. I believe that life is about learning how to become fully human. I cannot do that without the help of others who are on the same journey with me. I heard a saying years ago; "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far together." I intend to go far, therefore I know that I will never have to go alone.
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