# data[].attributes.body
By: Connor Franta

# data[].attributes.body
My family is my stone. They love and support me no matter what and I´m forever grateful for that.

# data[].attributes.body
I don´t have many friends. I have a couple true friends and all the rest of the people i know are aquatinces. Gracie is my best friend. She´s my rock, she´ś always been there for me and I know she will neber leave my side. I´m very grateful to have a true friend like her in my life. I would not trade our friendship for the world. I love Gracie and I cherish our friendship a lot.

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about how difficult it is to find true friends but it outlines the meaning of a true friendship. it shows how important true friends are. It also talks about how hard true friends are to find but once you find them its a very special friendship.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
True friends are hard to find.

They stick closer than family, and often know you better. They pray bigger things for you than you pray for yourself. They believe with you when your faith is weak. They make space for you when life falls apart, and they rejoice with you when all is well. Most importantly, true friends remind you in every encounter who and what is most important.

The essence of Christian friendship is companionship forged in the fire of two convictions: 1) Jesus alone can satisfy the soul and 2) his kingdom alone is worth living for.

Enemies in Disguise?

Christian friendship is a treasure because it helps us cling to our greatest Treasure.

Jesus is our Bread of Life, our Living Water, our Pearl of Great Price, our Light, our Resurrection, our very Life. The greatest danger to our souls is that we might abandon abiding in him, following him, and finding our joy in him. Therefore, the best gift a friend can give is a commitment to fight for our joy in and communion with Christ.

Conversely, the worst distortion of friendship arises when a friend encourages us, consciously or unconsciously, to place our affections elsewhere. The apostle Peter unwittingly acts out this kind of distortion in Matthew 16. Jesus tells his disciples that he will die and rise again (Matthew 16:21). Peter rebukes Jesus with what was surely a well-intentioned comment from a loyal friend: "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you" (Matthew 16:22).

It looks like the deepest, most genuine, most beautiful form of friendship, but Peter's words put him between Jesus and his obedience to the Father. His ignorance made a friend into an enemy, at least for a moment. "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me" (Matthew 16:23). What Peter thought was helpful, Jesus called a hindrance. What Peter assumed was godly friendship, Jesus called satanic opposition.

Five Marks of Christian Friendship

So, how can we avoid Peter's mistake in our friendships? How can we be a friend who preserves and strengthens the faith of others? Here are five distinct ways that true Christian friendships bolster our love for Christ through our love for one another.

1. True friends heighten our joy in God.

Companionship always deepens joy. My favorite movie is good when watched alone, but it's better with a friend. Somehow a great meal is more satisfying when shared. We naturally drag our friends into what we enjoy: "You have to see this movie!" "You have to come to this restaurant with me!"

But of all the joys of life, God is the greatest! We were made for him - to enjoy him and center our hearts and lives on him. And like any other joy, our joy in God will be fullest when we share it with other people. Christian friends help us enjoy God by enjoying him with us.

It's tempting to flip and distort this formula by using God as a means to enjoy people more. If we only go to him to ask for spouses, friends, or kids to enjoy, it reveals we see God as the means to someone else. We should be doing the opposite: looking for more of him in other people. Ironically, we will enjoy our friends more, the more our friendships become a means of enjoying God.

2. True friends expose sin in us that keeps us from God.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy. (Proverbs 27:6)

Sin deceives us. It darkens our understanding and makes us fools. So much so that we may be walking in sin and convinced that we are obeying God (think of the Pharisees). This is why we desperately need friends.

We need friends to lovingly show us our sin. We need friends to help us see our blind spots. We need friends to speak with brutal honesty (Matthew 18:15) and tender compassion (Galatians 6:1), telling us the truth about ourselves even when we don't want to hear it (Ephesians 4:15).

This is a vital function of community that few people want. We'd much rather have friends who always tell us what we want to hear, who show us the false grace of excusing sin and give us false hope that we can grow closer to God without repentance. But because sin is a poison to our souls and a thief of our joy in God, we cannot afford to forsake this kind of friendship.

3. True friends encourage us to obey God.

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. (Hebrews 10:24; see also Hebrews 3:13)

While it is true we need friends to help us see any disobedience, we also need them to spur us on to obedience. Often, obedience to God takes more courage than we can muster alone. Without the faithful cheerleading of Christian friends, we easily shrink back into stagnant apathy, not wanting to willfully disobey, but also too afraid to step out in faith.

The encouragement we are told to give isn't flattery, or superficial inspiration. En-courage-ment is giving courage and strength to others for the intimidating task before them. We cast a bigger vision for why their obedience matters for God's kingdom. We affirm that their obedience glorifies God and counts in eternity.

Whatever form it takes, encouragement motivates others to continue running the specific race God has marked out for them.

4. True friends bring us to God in our weakness.

Behold, some men were bringing on a bed a man who was paralyzed, and they were seeking to bring him in and lay him before Jesus, but finding no way to bring him in, because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the midst before Jesus. (Luke 5:18-19)

Walking through life in a God-belittling world, with our sin-ridden flesh, against a hell-bent enemy, is too hard to be attempted alone. Alone, we easily believe the lies of Satan. Alone, we buckle under the weight of our sin. Alone, we grow discouraged and weary. Like the paralytic, we need the help of other believers to carry us to God.

So, how can we bring others to God? We listen to a sister confess a hidden sin and wash her with the truth that Christ has cleansed her and made her whole. We can meet the practical needs of those enduring intense suffering in Jesus's name. Or we can simply bring our friends to God in prayer, asking him to do greater things in their lives than we can do for them.

5. True friends love us for the glory of God.

Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

The world's idea of intimacy in friendship is making much of one another: "I can't live without you!" Compliments and pledges of devotion quickly give a brief and false adrenaline rush of importance and significance. We certainly need to encourage and affirm one another, but Christian friends should be far more focused on God's weight and significance - not their own or their friend's.

Like everything else, the end goal of our friendships should be God and his glory. Since our hearts are prone to wander away and worship other things, we need these constant reminders of his glory and his worth in our friendships.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
True friends are hard to find. They stick closer than family, and often know you better. They pray bigger things for you than you pray for yourself. They believe with you when your faith is weak. They make space for you when life falls apart, and they rejoice with you when all is well.

# data[].attributes.body
In this article, it talks about how the writer had an easier time making friends when he was little and as he grew, it was harder to make friends. but technology made it easier for him to make and keep friends. but it talks about how as you grow, you don´t have as many friends, but the friends that you do have are true.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At a moment when technology has made cultivating relationships easier, but also shallower, one writer considers the importance of undocumented friendships.

Is childhood the golden era of friendship? And can you get those relationships back? The other day, I took down from the shelf a beautiful novel by William Maxwell - "So Long, See You Tomorrow" - and I realized the title alone summons the unspoken bond, the constant availability, the relentless promise that friendship is when you are 12. My great friend at that age was Mark MacDonald. In those early, rain-soaked days on Scotland's west coast, Mark was my constant companion and my secret weapon: Whatever happened at home, there would always be Mark to brighten the day and spit with style like River Phoenix did in "Stand by Me," via a rolled-up tongue. We would be up at the crack of dawn to wander over the fields, scan the beaches for coins, climb the hills together and sit in the graveyard comparing our plans for world domination. Mark had Crohn's disease; he was often in hospital, and we'd write to each other planning our adventures for the summer. He told me I was a good writer and I told him he was a great painter, before we disappeared from each other's lives. I haven't seen him in 30 years.

When I recently tried to find Mark again, he didn't appear to exist. Like the boys in Maxwell's novel, he seemed like a figment, or a fragile piece of memory that crumbles when you turn it in your hands. He wasn't to be found at the old address I had for him in the seaside town of Saltcoats. His name is a popular one on Facebook, but none of the Marks I found was the one I knew, and he wasn't on Twitter or Instagram either. None of the search engines reveal anything about Mark. I tried death certificates, fearing, as I have for a long time, that my old friend might have died. I asked my mother if any of her friends had kept in touch with the family but none had. I could remember two of his sisters' names but they didn't show up on the internet either. When I went back to Scotland recently, I drove to the square where we once lived, and I looked up at the window of my old house, remembering how I used to shine a torch from there to Mark's bedroom. Two flashes meant good night. Three flashes meant see you tomorrow.

I wonder if technology has changed the meaning of friendship. My daughter is 12 and most things that happen to her are photographed. She and her friends get together and spend hours trying out poses, making videos, retouching them, setting them to music and posting them on this or that social media network. I'm sure the girls are bonded in many of the traditional ways, but I also wonder if they'll ever lose sight of each other, which was always one of the possibilities of friendship, an aspect of its mystery. I think we always knew we would move on in life and that our great friendships would be a matter of memory. I don't have a single photograph of Mark MacDonald. I don't think we were ever photographed together, and that adds to the notion that our friendship was a fiction. Social media is a vehicle of self-promotion, a means of fixing an idea of yourself in the social sphere, without people actually knowing you at all. And that's a change: The thing about friendship used to be that the ideal was shared entirely by the pair of you, or sometimes by a group, yet it remained local, and that was part of its power.

It's the mindfulness I miss. A pair of excellent youngsters in my wider family have over 1,000 Facebook "friends" between them. They say they don't know half of them, and that some of them are "frenemies." The social network gives them the option of corralling people into "close friends" or "acquaintances," and, naturally, they always have the option of clicking "unfriend." But are the majority of these people friends or are they just names? You can know everything that's going on in people's lives without knowing a single thing going on in their hearts. But is that friendship? I'm told that empathy still flowers in the usual way, but I have my doubts. People now in their 20s have a lot of self-advertising talent, but are they, I wonder, close to the point where a bad breakup, say, or a death in the family, isn't a moment of opportunity for the protective and dignifying balms of old friendship, but simply a quiet day on social media?

The times we live in are big on loyalty. Technology has driven us wild with questions of loyalty to flags, to nations, to a "way of life" or to brands who give out "loyalty points" to those who stay tight. But the only kind of loyalty that matters is to know your friends and stick with them. The relationship has nothing really to do with outside people, or with your self-image or with status updates, and perhaps our vision of friendship has been degraded by the instantaneous, relentless nature of our communications technology. Replace "watch and click" with "listen and feel," close the curtains and mix two drinks, download nothing, "share" nothing, but lose yourself in the sort of communication that has nothing to sell.

Love gets all the big headlines, but friendship is where the action is, especially if you consider that it is really a lack of friendship that makes an unhappy marriage. Fundamentally, it's the art of friendship that warms you in the various winters of your discontent, and when you're in trouble you don't want 1,000 people, but just one. "Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain," the late Muhammad Ali is thought to have said. "It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything." And that is why I miss my old friend Mark. There was something there that stood outside of achievement or romance, money or technology, religion or reputation. As I say, I was never photographed with Mark MacDonald and I never hugged him or bought him lunch either. But sometimes in a dark hour I'll look up and imagine I see him, not far distant, a living guarantee that there will always be someone in life who really knows who you are. When all the machines are off and when all the chips are down, I see his light. Three flashes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At a moment when technology has made cultivating relationships easier, but also shallower, one writer considers the importance of undocumented friendships. Is childhood the golden era of friendship? And can you get those relationships back?

# data[].attributes.body
Your social status means nothing if your relationships are not pure and genuine.

# data[].attributes.body
"As you get older, sometimes your goals will take you away from your closest friends"

# data[].attributes.body
1. Connor grew up with an amazing family
2. As Connor became a teen he made good freinds. Not a lot, but he made true friendships
3. Connors relationship with his parents stayed strong and he had a lot of trust in his parents and he confided in them.
4. He found that it didn't matter how many friends he had because his friends were true friends.

# data[].attributes.body
"I've always appeared to have a lot of friends, but appearances can be deceiving."

# data[].attributes.body
"Love trumps fear every time"

# data[].attributes.body
"We frequently act like someone other than who we really are because we aren't comfortable with our true selves"

# data[].attributes.body
"for me, childhood is a collection of snapshot memories and milestones, some of which might seem trivial to outsiders but left a lasting impression on me"