Friendship Fridays: Sheridan Voysey on why friendship matters

19 May 2023

Hearing that my friend Sheridan Voysey would introduce my new book Transforming Love: How Friendship with Jesus Changes Us thrilled me. Sheridan heads up the new Friendship Lab and is doing important work to further not only the understanding about the importance of friendship but to help people to deepen these important relationships in their lives. I’m so enjoying the pilot course he’s running. Enjoy his foreword to my book:

As survey after survey and headline after headline remind us, the recovery of deep friendship is the great need of the hour. Our countries, communities and even some of our churches are getting lonelier by the year as we live, work and worship alone, surrounded by many but connected meaningfully to few.

I have long had a hunch that the stories of Mary, Martha and Lazarus in the Gospels hold clues to remedy our situation. The three siblings seem to have found a special place in Jesus’s heart. We find them offering Jesus hospitality in their home, eating and resting together. We’re told repeatedly that Jesus ‘loves’ this trio, a term of affection used of no one else but the apostle John (who uses it of himself, and only once). The bond they forge is so close that when Lazarus falls ill the sisters don’t have to mention his name, saying only, ‘Lord, the one you love is ill’ (John 11:3). And yet none of the three is part of Jesus’s inner twelve, or his larger group of seventy-two disciples. Mary, Martha and Lazarus aren’t Jesus’s ministry colleagues – they’re his friends.

We can go further. At the friendship project I lead, Friendship Lab, we describe a friend as someone we can talk to, depend on, grow with and enjoy, and each of these elements is present in the siblings’ relationship with Jesus. Look at how intimate their conversations get, with Martha free to express her frustrations and Mary free to express her disappointment, even in him. See how they can depend on Jesus to help their sick brother, even when it puts his own life at risk. Read how Mary and Martha grow in faith, getting opportunities to learn and serve typically reserved for men in their time, and how Lazarus (literally) steps into a new season of life. Watch how they enjoy each other at celebratory dinner parties. This kind of affection, connection and support is what our lonely age longs for.

And so I’m thrilled to introduce Transforming Love by my friend Amy Boucher Pye. With imaginative exploration of these biblical stories and sensitivity to overlooked cultural details, Amy teases out this unique relationship and the transformative effect it has on Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Because at its best friendship is transformative, shaping our characters and destinies like few other forces can, and what’s true of natural friendship is multiplied hundredfold when Jesus is involved. As Amy takes us into the three key encounters the siblings have with him, ushering us into the story as if it were we instead of they who are sitting at Jesus’s feet, being comforted in our loss, or feeling our cold bodies return to life, we come to claim our status as Jesus’s friends too, and the transformation they receive becomes our own. Combined with Amy’s guiding prayers and creative spiritual practices, the result is a rich, graceful exploration of how Jesus befriends and changes us.

Like other aspects of life, friendship flourishes when we have healthy models to emulate. Well, here’s the model. As a mountain-top waterfall nourishes the valley below it, Jesus is the source of deep friendship, our vertical relationship with him flowing to the horizontal relationships around us. Let’s cup our hands, drink deeply and let this friendship with God transform us into the finest of friends to others.