Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

 

Stop and think a minute—what was the first problem that mankind ever had?

It wasn’t sin… it was solitude. The first problem in paradise was summed up by God in the first book of the Bible, when He said, “It is not good for [the] man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Today, “Loneliness is a growing health epidemic. We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.” One of the world’s leading physicians says, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.”[1]

Want to stay well and thrive in this tumultuous world? Find a friend and be a friend. Here’s why, explains the Bible book of Ecclesiastes: “Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

Technology gives us a false sense of connection. Real friendship involves presence in one another’s lives.  “…A real friend,” say the Proverbs, “sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24b).

Are you a friend who shows up? Not with advice or gifts but with open ears and arms? The gift of presence is the most important part of any friendship. Who in your life needs your presence? Like the poet of another century, may we say of our friendships, “Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me.”[2]

 

[1] Murthy, Vivek. “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic.” Harvard Business Review, 8 Nov. 2022, hbr.org/2017/09/work-and-the-loneliness-epidemic.

[2] “The Walt Whitman Archive.” ONCE I PASS’D THROUGH A POPULOUS CITY. (Leaves of Grass (1891–1892)) – The Walt Whitman Archive, whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/41. Accessed 17 Oct. 2023.