the joy of friends who hurt you

This is my buddy Dunc, who is my best friend from school and who tbV and i are currently staying with while we try find a place to live [as well as his wife Megan and sons Connor and Ryan].

Three times a week he intentionally causes me a lot of pain…

…and it’s great!

Wounds from a friend can be trusted,
    but an enemy multiplies kisses.

Well, to be more accurate he ensures that i am in the place of pain.

i usually use that verse from Proverbs 27.6 in the Bible to talk about accountability and someone who is not scared to love you well by telling you when you are doing something foolish or hurtful. But in this case it’s slightly different, although i guess still a form of accountability, as Duncan is my 100 push-ups partner.

When i was in Stellenbosch i did this before about four years ago, and i think both of us are quite skeptical as to how i could have finished it back then, but Dunc was doing it when we moved in and so i joined him.

It is a six week program that you can find at hundredpushups.com although the reality is that if you don’t complete a week you do it again and so we are on week ten or something but in week 5 of the program. Today we attempted sets of 20, 20, 24, 24, 20, 20, 22 and then as many as you can with a minimum of 50. All with 45 second intervals in between.

i use the word ‘attempted’ as mine looked a lot more like 20, 20, 24, 24, 13, 13, 13, 18 which as you can see is far off the mark.

But it is also 145 pushups in about 15 minutes, which is not such a bad thing. Especially as we go on to do five different arm muscle builders with some hand weights.

What makes it easier though, and far more enjoyable, is that i have a good buddy doing it with me. And even more than that, no matter how crap i am, he is constantly cheering me on and telling me how good i’m doing. He nailed all of them except the last one and i was short on four of the sets [having given blood yesterday, as he kept telling me, may have had some small effect] and yet he keeps on shouting out, “Good work, buddy. You’re doing great.”

We’re probably a couple of weeks away from bottles though.

So friends who push you to be the best you can be, who hold you accountable, who challenge you three times a week to do something that will stretch you and cause you a fair deal of pain but which will have good results in the end… you can’t buy these with money.

And i truly do have some of the best friends in the world…

Who hurts you? i would LOVE to hear about someone in the comments section who is your Duncan… tell us a story!

And of course, who are YOU Duncan to?

What kind of friend are you, anyway?

i don’t think we talk about Friendship enough.

in fact, i think too often, too many of us might take it for granted.

i don’t think i do. i am just so constantly made aware of how many incredible friends i have in and around my life – the term ‘best friend’ relates to at least 7 people i can think of straight away who are all ‘best friends’ in differing but equivalent ways.

and when i start listing quality friends, well i can just write a very long list without much thought at all.

those are the easy ones though – it is so easy to be friends with those people because what they bring to the party is immediately obvious and amazing and life-giving and so on. but then i read this comment about Eeyore the other day and it really struck me:

do i have any people like that in my life? do you?

and if not, is there someone who may be that person but we may not have invited them in to the group like Pooh and the gang above?

do our friends need to measure up to a certain level to earn the right and privilege of sticking around?

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a second thing when it comes to friendship is that as much as i LOVE to have fun and be silly and crazy and ridiculous with my friends [you know who you are!] i also very much like to think deeply and wrestle with faith and life and God and money and stuff and things. fortunately i have good mates that i can do both with. and for the most part find both of those things in a lot of my good friends which is great.

and in amongst a vomitarium of kitch and cheesy friendship quote posters on the Uncle Google, i managed to locate this gem, which i really like…

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the third thing i have mentioned a bunch of times, because i believe in it so strongly and i feel like these three pictures combinedly capture the essence of it:

 

 

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What about you? What do you look for in a friend? In fact, if you think of your best friend, what is the one characteristic that stands out for you in terms of something you realy appreciate in them?

i would LOVE to hear some of those.