Posts Tagged ‘1 Corinthians 1’

Friendship during COVID has presented an incredible challenge. Recently updated research from Cigna showed that a staggering 61% of people feel lonely. And that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and other well-known health problems. 

And those findings were BEFORE coronavirus. I can’t imagine those statistics have improved in recent months.

We need each other. That’s been true since the earliest days of humanity when God said it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone. The Bible speaks a great deal to our being designed for community (and offers much wisdom on how to do it well). I’ve often written and spoken on friendship because of how much I value it. 

COVID is testing friendships in unprecedented ways (though it’s certainly not the only challenge to relationships; political divides and geographic distance are too.). I saw a post on social media in which a person lamented the collapse of 40-year-long friendships because of the differing perspectives on COVID. This makes me ache. While we can avoid topics of conversation we know create conflict (I have friends who’ve agreed to not talk about politics because they both get a big too angsty), coronavirus cannot be avoided as a conversational topic because our (potential) differences affect whether and how we interact at all. 

So, how are we to build friendships right now? How do we make new friends if we’ve recently relocated? I’ve got a few guiding principles to share and then a handful of tips to offer.