Hallmark cards and American Greetings got together in a backroom at Readers Digest headquarters in Pleasantville, NY, some years ago and decided that June 8th would be National Best Friends Day. So, it being June 8th and all, I will be standing like Charlie Brown by my mailbox today waiting for all those cards and letters to come in from my best friends.

I found out about National Best Friends Day, or NBFD, as I like to call it, just minutes ago as I was reading my e-mails. A stock trading company informed me that I could win a $50 Amazon gift card by subjecting my “Best Friends” to endless spam solicitations from their company. All I had to do was betray an implied privacy trust and divulge their contact information to a bunch of sleazy capitalists.

Needing more stuff from Amazon, I decided to go for it. Most of you can expect to start receiving valuable investment advice in just a day or so. You’re welcome. What are friends for?

All this silliness aside, I did begin to think about friendship as a result of their inane advertisement. What makes a friend? Who gets to be a “Best Friend”? What are the qualifications? Am I a best friend? Do I have a best friend? And what is this new innovation a “Best Friend Forever”? Is being a BFF even possible?

So here is where my mind went in contemplating modern friendship:

Facebook: Over the last twenty years friendship has evolved, or devolved I suppose. About 15 years ago an undergrad student at Duke wanted to introduce me to social media. He said you gotta get on Facebook. You can connect with old friends and make new ones, “It’s great!” So not wanting to be un-cool, I decided to give it a go. Cue the crickets. In 2006 nobody in my generation had an account on Facebook. It wasn’t even the dominant social platform back then. My Space was number one. He urged me to try that one too but it turned out to be an early version of Tender, the online hookup site. I quickly dropped that account thinking it was pretty inappropriate for a married, Christian, father.

But I kept the Facebook account and eventually reconnected to my old college buddies and high school friends. I got up to 300 friends! I felt popular but soon realized Facebook’s definition of friend wasn’t mine. I realized I hardly knew these people and sometimes I knew and liked a previous version of the person. I wasn’t always fond of the upgrade.

All this showed me that friendships change over time, relationships wax and wane. Friends from my younger days had gone on very different paths. Some had passed on. One of my best friends from grade school and middle school died of alcoholism when he was only 39 years old. I realized I had completely lost touch with one of my “best friends”. Another young woman, a friend and neighbor, died before she was thirty. She had been in our house practically daily for years. I never even knew she was sick. How could she have been a friend?

Dividing lines: Some of my friends became Christians while I was still an atheist. I ditched them as fast I could. Ironically my atheist and agnostic friends returned the favor when I made my decision to follow Christ years later. You really do reap what you sew. Some of us have reconnected, some seem to have been lost for good.

Friends you never had: When I was in grade school I knew a guy I considered my best friend from the second to the fifth grade. Ted made going to school fun. He had a great sense of humor and we always had fun working together and cutting up in class. One day he hurt me worse than anybody had ever hurt me before. I said something or did something he didn’t like and he turned around and told me that we weren’t friends, and that he never liked me. I was shocked. I knew it wasn’t true, but why would he want to hurt me like that? I guess I’ll never know.

True Friends: I always wanted to be good friend. When I was younger I wanted to be the guy you called when you got in a jam. I was able to do that once. My memory is unclear about it because the circumstances were strange. When I was in high school there was a popular make out spot a few mile from the neighborhood called Slime Lake. Kids would go out and drink beer and shoot off fireworks and play music and make out. One night I got a call from my best friend Billy. He had taken his girl out to Slime lake and gotten stuck in the soft ground around the lake. It couldn’t have been too late because this was before cell phones and he’d have had to call from a pay phone. I would have had to answer the phone in the kitchen downstairs from my bedroom.

I went out to the lake and pushed him out. He was really grateful. I think that is how a true friend acts, if they can.

When I became a Christian I found out that Jesus was my friend. He is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. (Proverbs 18:24) As a Christian I learned that friendship was different between believers. It was easy to make good friends from diverse backgrounds. They were like family because they were family.

I guess the closest friend I have now is a bit of a miracle because he didn’t like me when we met. He felt guilty about that so he prayed that the Lord would give him a love for me. We’ve been friends for 35 years now. He’s the guy that I can always count on. Our families got together many Sunday afternoons for food and fellowship. We helped each other with projects from time to time but mostly we just hung out and talked and had fun. And we still do. David will argue with me and rib me and tease me, but mostly he just cares about me. And I care about him. Even though we live 150 mile apart, I try to see him on a regular basis.

My second closest friend is a woman. Something that I think is rare and I used to think was impossible. For a married man to have a close friend that’s a woman is, I think, dangerous under normal circumstances. But sometimes the situation occurs that allows it. First of all she is married and one of my wife’s best friends. She’s the mother of one of my daughters closest friends from childhood. Lori and her daughter vacationed with us several times when our daughters were growing up so we were able to get to know each other in comfortable circumstances. Second, we both serve on the board of a Christian camp in Southwest Virginia. All of this has allowed us to get to know each other better than we normally would ave been able to so we were able to become friends our own.

When we moved to Virginia ten years ago Lori and David not only helped us pack but they drove with us up to the new house and helped unload the moving van along with my Father. That was really a wonderful act of love I will never forget. Are we allowed two best friends? If so that’s my two.

I appreciate all the friends I’ve had in life. They got me through it. I knew that I was not alone, that someone who didn’t really have to cared about me. And that is about as Christlike as we humans can be.

So Happy National Best Friends Day. Remember all those close friends that make your life a joy and comfort.