who Are Your Friends -- The Codicil

Last month, I discussed Joseph Smith’s quote:

How good and glorious it has seemed unto me, to find pure and holy friends, who are faithful, just, and true, and whose hearts fail not; and whose knees are confirmed and do not falter, while they wait upon the Lord…

My premise was that we should follow the prophet’s counsel when we choose friends. But I thought about my premise all month – off and on—and finally decided that limiting ourselves in that way is a rather narrow and selfish view of friendship in general, and severely limits our ability to enrich our lives. And so I write this codicil.

Who Are Your Friends?

Nearly everybody has something to say about how to find true friends, how to keep them, and how to recognize them. The internet is full of advice, good and bad. Perhaps the best source for this advice is the prophet of the restoration. He defined for us the eternal and celestial qualities true friends should have. Joseph Smith wrote the following about the family members and friends who visited him on August 11, 1842, while he was in hiding in and around Nauvoo from a Missouri extradition order:

The Christmas Pocketknife

Virgin Utah – a couple of days after Christmas, 1953. Many people who lived in Virgin in 1953 were, by any standard, poverty stricken. They had little money, grew gardens for food, and struggled every day to keep their families fed and a roof over their heads. Outhouses were the norm, and running water might have been a well if you were lucky, if not it was the Virgin River. Christmas was not the same to them as it is to us.

The Real World

When we go to our Sunday meetings, when we go to the temple, when we attend stake or regional conferences, we often feel that we are in another place, a place removed from the cares and problems of daily life: A place of temporary respite from the pressures and demands of earning a living, commuting to work, from overbearing and sometimes unreasonable managers and rude co-workers, from impossible deadlines, discourtesy, crudity, immorality, and depravity.

Thirty-Five Cents

Some years ago, our family went to California to see "Phantom of the Opera" in San Francisco. We stayed with my brother, Harold, in Antioch and rode the Bay area Rapid Transit (BART) train to San Francisco. It stopped just a couple of blocks from our destination. The production was sublime, and we were all in a happy mood walking back to the BART stop when an obviously homeless man said to me: “I need thirty-five cents to have enough for a hamburger at Burger King.” I brushed him off, to my eternal regret, because he made the same request of my daughter, Marie, who was right behind me. She gave him what he asked, and he walked straight across the street and into Burger King.

Random Acts of Kindness

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to Target to get something. I stayed in the car because of my recent back surgery. While waiting, I listened to the radio. When Kathy came back, she tried to start the car, but all she got was the irritating and frightening clicking noise the starter solenoid makes when the battery is almost dead.

Incremental Progress

We have been instructed in the scriptures and through our prophets that we need to perfect ourselves, just as the Savior and our Father are perfect. In 3 Nephi 12:48, we read:

Therefore I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect.