C.S. Lewis

Soooooo I am kinda running out of topics to just make up so that I can blabber on for fun about so we will do a little summary of the past few days of my life plus some stuff on a book I’ve been reading. So:

Got back into town a week ago today, but I didn’t really do a whole lot, but Andrew stayed over. Wednesday I went mountain biking with Doug which was totally wicked awesome. I’m can’t wait to go back this week. That’s where I took this awesome photo:

Thursday, hmmm…. Thursday was a lax day and I think I was over with Hudson for quite a while. Friday was a day of trail riding and getting all muddy as shown below:

Pretty sick ride, and that wasn’t even the end of it. Saturday I ran around and did errands and stuff cause it was Os’s birthday. Then Sunday we had the choir party. Whoop Whoop. Yesterday I had an engineering party (we went ice skating) Booyah and then Caroling at the Smed’s spent the night, and now I’m home. I left a few details out along the way, but you get the general idea. I’ve been out a lot, and tonight is the camp bwood staff reunion! Yeehaw.

So I’m also reading “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis for funsies. Anyways it talks about the three loves that we see every day. Affection-love, Eros-love, Philia-love, and Agape-love. Each of these loves are complexities of human nature that are necessary for survival. Were it not for affection-love, we would not be raised with love and nuture from our parents. Were it not for eros-love, well, we wouldn’t be born haha. Agape-love saves us all from eternal condemnation, but Philia-love. How is the love between friends necessary for our survival? Honestly, its not entirely necessary for our survival, but it places us in a category above that of other animals.

Finding people who you do stuff with is finding a companion, and many people mistake this for friends. Friends, however, are companions who share similar opinions and life views and bring out the best in one another when they are all present. These are people who do not disassociate because of distance or time management issues, but can always reunite over the same topic. For me and a few of my friends. That topic is the Love of God. Honestly, if you look at any of your friends from church. If any of them decided they weren’t gonna be a Christian anymore, you would still see them every now and then and hang out and be “Companions”, but you would lose your similar views and likes and just couldn’t be friends anymore.

Two things of note, if someone isn’t your friend now because they don’t share the same beliefs now doesn’t mean they weren’t your friend then, but if something shapes your relationship by your proximity or something similar, then you may have just been companions all along. Another side note on the idea of friends is that you do not pick your friends any more than you choose the color of the hair on your head (yes I said that yesterday). God chooses them for you. He chooses them so that each may bring out the best in the other and that God may be glorified by them to the best of their abilities.

So in conclusion, I’m not saying go and reevaluate your friendships and decide to tell people you aren’t friends anymore. The term friends doesn’t mean the same thing now as then. Then it was a love shared between to people that was sacrificial, but was based on the idea of a shared principle rather than a deeper love as shown in Eros and Agape. What I am saying is take the time this break to appreciate your friends, and your Philia Friends. And if you forget one, let it be the former. See ya later guys!

 

----Walking Man