Read About Friendship No. 4

Each week, the Read About Friendship series features a well-known author and his or her writings on friendship. Feel free to submit other quotes and info about these authors, or to suggest authors for future posts, in the comments section.

Eugene Peterson On Friendship

Each of us has contact with hundreds of people who never look beyond our surface appearance. We have dealings with hundreds of people who the moment they set eyes on us begin calculating what we can be to them, what they can get out of us. We meet hundreds of people who take one look at us, make a snap judgment, and then slot us into a category so that they won’t have to deal with us as persons. They treat us as something less than we are; and if we’re in constant association with them, we become less.

And then someone enters our life who isn’t looking for someone to use, is leisurely enough to find out what’s really going on in us, is secure enough nor to exploit our weaknesses or attack our strengths, recognizes our inner life and understands the difficulty of living out our inner convictions, confirms what’s deepest within us. A friend.

–Leap Over a Wall, pg. 54

Read earlier posts on friendship featuring C.S. Lewis, Brennan Manning and Henri Nouwen.