REXBURG, Idaho — Making lifelong friends “who will influence how you think and act” is one of the most important opportunities young adults will have at this time in their lives, the editor and publisher of the Deseret News told students at Brigham Young University–Idaho during a Tuesday devotional assembly.
“Chosen and fostered carefully, such friendships will, in the words of the booklet ‘For the Strength of Youth,’ ‘help you be a better person and will make it easier for you to live the gospel of Jesus Christ,’” said Paul Edwards, quoting from a publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints intended for distribution to youth in the church.
“Friendship is an act of mutual choice persisting only as long as it is beneficial to both parties,” Edwards observed. “Perhaps because it is so closely related to taste and choice and born of serendipity, friendship has received far less attention than family in formal religious teaching and guidance.”
While covenantal obligations to family are part of the fabric of Mormonism, “I think it is clear from scriptural precepts and narratives that we have important sacred obligations of care that extend beyond our family,” Edwards remarked.
He cited a recent survey of people ages 18-24. Generalizing the findings to his university audience, he said, “On average, you have about 200 more friends on Facebook than I do. Based on your ‘friending’ behaviors on Facebook, you are demonstrably nearly 50 percent ‘friendlier’ than I am.”
Yet other social indicators suggest people today have fewer intimate friends than did adults of yesteryear, he added.
He spoke of four kinds of love identified by the ancient Greeks and added that what they called “philia,” sometimes referred to as brotherly love, is the kind of deep friendship he was asking his audience to consider in depth. It is the kind of deep friendship, he said, between the fictional characters Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and Harry Potter in the popular novel by J. K. Rowling.
He quoted 20th-century Christian apologist C. S. Lewis as saying that this type of friendship arises “when two or more … companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
That, he said, was how his friendship with BYU-Idaho President Clark Gilbert developed. Gilbert left his post last year as president and CEO of the Deseret News. While with the newspaper, he hired Edwards. But before that, they knew each other as fellow administrators in higher education and found they shared a sense of mission to dramatically improve higher education to accelerate student accomplishment.
Edwards asked, “Are you using the friendship that God has afforded you as an instrument for redemptive assistance? When, through blessed opportunities for companionship afforded by school, work, missions and church callings you have identified that unique spark of shared interest that has you pull away from the crowd into a duo, or trio, or quartet of friends, is it a school of virtue or a school for scandal? Is your conversation edifying? Or does it devolve into criticism, gossip and conspiracy?”
While part of the joy of friendship is in affording a means to goof off, vent a frustration or discuss a doubt, “if it is only that, then I believe you have probably found a clique rather than a fellowship,” Edwards said.
Small cadres of true face-to-face friends, as contrasted with social media friends, will be a lifelong resource, he declared.
“When in my adult life I have turned to the Lord for help with the death of a loved one, with a troubling doubt, with a wandering child, a professional setback or a bout of the blues, he has invariably answered my prayers through the instrument of a dear old friend,” Edwards said.
Citing LDS scripture in which Jesus Christ addresses his modern-day apostles as friends, Edwards said, “It is as if the Lord found in Joseph Smith and his courageous associates those special companions who shared the Savior’s passion to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”