They keep confidences. They care for us and we for them. We love them and they us.

God has made us in his image to relate at deep levels to others. Jesus wants us to be his friend and has revealed that same longing from God. God loves us and wants us to love him. God cares for us and we for him. We bring to God our failures, our mistakes, our sins, our shortcomings, as well as our joys and thanksgivings. We bring to God our worries and concerns.

We cannot hide anything from God because God knows our hearts. We can be still and know God without saying anything. We can commune with him, because he knows what we need before we ask him. The more we know someone, the more we need to communicate. We pick up where we left off. We bring them up to date. We fill in the gaps. In the process of conversation we discover new truths, just as by talking something out with a friend or counselor we gain wisdom and insight.

"To pray is to make the most of our moments of perception. You pause on the thing that has happened, you turn it over and over like a person examining a gift, you set it in the context of past and future, you mentally draw out its possibilities, you give the moment time to reveal what is embedded in it." (Alan Ecclestone, On Praying)

In friendship with God we must be able to express our trials and frustrations. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye keeps up a running dialogue with God, giving credit for the good things but also lamenting all that goes wrong. In one scene he sits dejected by the side of the road with his lame horse. "I can understand it," he says to God, "when you punish me when I am bad; or my wife because she talks too much; or my daughter when she wants to go off and marry a Gentile, but .... What have you got against my horse?."

Friendship depends upon honesty. That is why true friendship is rare. We find that few of our acquaintances are able to accept honesty in our relationships. We fear offending them. We fear defensiveness and rejection. Few relationships are able to survive complaint. Many of the prayers recorded in the Bible are searingly honest. Jeremiah gripes about unfairness. Job accuses God of injustice. Habbakkuk claims that God is deaf. The psalms are often songs of lament, protest and complaint about the injustice of life. They include passages that are angry, whiny, petty, remorseful, explosive, loud, and irreverent like private memos to a trusted friend. Eugene Peterson maintains that two-thirds of the psalms are songs of lament.

Philip Yancey describes participating in a couples' group that studied Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand, which explores the difference between male and female styles of communication. She delved into a common stereotype of female conversation, which she describes as 'ritual lament', or, as some would call it, 'griping.' Tannen's explanation is that women tend to bond in suffering. Through complaining, through gossip, they reaffirm connections with each other, connections strengthened through the ritual of lament. Women don't necessarily want the problem solved, they mainly want understanding and sympathy. Men, in contrast, instinctively want to respond to a complaint by fixing the problem that caused it. Otherwise, why complain?

Yancey writes that God seems to encourage ritual lament. Jeremiah whined, complained, and filled an entire book with lamentations. Job, who gave the most irreverent speeches in the Bible, emerges as the hero in the end, the spiritual director for his censured friends. If I question the propriety of an outburst before God, I need look no further than God's Son, Jesus, who prayed with 'loud cries and tears' and who in Gethsemane fell to the ground in anguish, shedding sweat like drops of blood.

Deborah Tannen notes that women usually outlive men and wonders if their tendency to let emotions out, rather than harbor them inside, might contribute to longevity. The Bible, and the Jewish race, came out of an Eastern culture that values emotional outbursts and intense feelings. God encourages friendship that allows for the honest expression of passionate feelings.

Yancey relates the story of Rabbi Dovid of Jerusalem in The Hasidic Tales, who was approached by a man suffering from a crisis of belief. Whatever reply Reb Dovid attempted, the man dismissed. So Reb Dovid restrained himself and simply listened to the man's rant and rave. For hours he listened. Finally he said, 'Why are you so angry with God?' This question stunned the man, as he had said nothing at all about God. He grew very quiet and looked at Reb Dovid and said: 'All my life I have been so afraid to express my anger to God that I have always directed my anger at people who are connected with God. But until this moment I did not understand this.'

The Reb Dovid stood up and told the man to follow him. He led him to the Wailing Wall, away from the place where people pray, to the site of the ruins of the Temple. When they reached that place, Reb Dovid told him that it was time to express all the anger he felt toward God. Then, for more than an hour, the man struck the wall with his hands and screamed his heart out. After that he began to cry and could not stop crying, and little by little his cries became sobs that turned into prayers. And that is how Reb Dovid taught him how to pray. (Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make A Difference? pp.59-69)

Jesus took all our anger upon himself on the Cross so that we might be cleansed and become his friends. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

We can be honest with Jesus because he has shown how much he loves us, how much he cares for us, how much he will stand by us, no matter what we have done or failed to do. We can express to him all our anger, all our sorrows, all our troubles, and he will carry them to the Cross.

Because he is our friend, we can tell him anything, and he will understand. Because he is our friend, he will hold us accountable to love each other. He chose us to be his friend. Let us go and bear fruit in our relationships with God and others - fruit that will last. The fruit of friendship love.

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