Later on this evening, I’m going to be meeting up with some people I went to school with. There will be some very familiar faces, some I know less well, and more who’ll barely remember me, but the reason I’m going is for the handful I really love. These are my oldest friends, who have known me most of my life, who I still see fairly often and who, frankly, know me a little too well.
When we were at school together, they were taller than me, cooler than me and funnier than me. These days, they’re taller than me, cooler than me and funnier than me. Nothing has changed. Except, of course, now I’m balder than them, which is just great.
So this is how it will go: we’ll hug, we’ll swap news and family greetings – and then we’ll fall to teasing each other and I will find myself feeling like I did when I was fifteen and they used to call me Smurf. Seriously. Smurf. That’s a lawsuit for mental cruelty right there.
If all this sounds like the worst kind of school reunion torture, then let me reassure you, there is an upside. Because these friends know me, really know me, there’s no need for pretence between us. And because they really know me there’s no need for judgement either. The combination of honesty and acceptance is what makes these sorts of friendships so precious.
It’s not always easy to be a friend, though.
The Bible tells us a lot about the difficulty of friendship, about betrayal, criticism and terrible advice; but if it teaches us that friendship is a hard thing to get right, it also offers something to aspire to. When Moses was leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, we learn that God ‘would speak to him face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’.
That’s an astonishing picture, but Christians believe that Jesus has made it possible for everyone to know God in exactly that way; face to face, as a person speaks to their friend. And if I know that I can be as intimate as that with God, who knows me better than any of my human friends, then it makes it easier for me to be a good friend to them. Which is what I’d like to be; even if they do call me Smurf.
One day, in the minibus after a school cross-country race, our coach, Barry Goater, turned round and said, “I’m not having anyone in my team called Smurf”. And that, mercifully, was the end of that.