Nobody wants to be stuck in the “friend zone.” It’s something to avoid like eating garlic before a date. Hair on your pizza. A dog’s organic product on the sidewalk. Originating in the seventh episode of the iconic sitcom Friends (“The One with the Blackout”), the “friend zone” is etched into the modern imagination as a no-man’s land to evade.
The negative vibes surrounding the “friend zone” come in the context of someone longing specifically for a friendship to form into a romance. But the phrase reflects our culture’s tendency to minimize deep friendships in general in order to prioritize relationships that offer a more immediate payoff—especially in the realms of romance, parenting, and career advancement.
But what if minimizing friendship is causing us to miss more than we realize? What if our evasion of friends is diluting our ability to experience God?
When we look at the biblical portrait of friendship, we find that friends aren’t an optional side to add to our plates in a buffet of relationships. Instead, the “friend zone” is something to be embraced.
Why? Because friendship is a shared space where we encounter and are transformed by the God who made us for each other.
How does that happen? By embracing friendship with beautiful mundanity and meaningful messiness.
Beautiful Mundanity
When people recognized Jesus as a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:19), the identifying markers were subversive, yet ordinary: he was eating and drinking with them. Friendship with Jesus wasn’t fostered in incessant “spiritual highs” or the extravagant experiences defined by the cultural moment. This reveals that deep connection with God and others is usually grown in the soil of ordinary life together.
In fact, it’s often through the mundane rhythms of friendship that we experience the beautiful movement of God’s presence in our lives.
- When we share ordinary meals and refuse to “perform” through extravagant hosting, we’re a living picture of the God who graciously dwells with us here and now, as we are.
- When we talk, listen, laugh, and weep together, we’re experiencing the connection that God has with us in every emotion and season of life we encounter.
- When stay in touch on the ordinary movements of life via text or phone call (yes, even when we’re just sharing videos and memes that make us chuckle) we get a taste of God’s care over all of creation and all of who we are.
The mundane isn’t a second-rate ticket to experiencing connection with God and others. On the contrary, the ordinary areas of our shared life open us up to the God who is big enough to display beauty in all things.
Meaningful Messiness
In his book, From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks makes a helpful distinction between “deal friends” and real friends. “Deal friends” use each other to achieve an elevated status in vocational or social settings—the substance of their friendship rests on an (often unstated) deal. Real friends aren’t in it for the transaction. Real friends thrive in the messiness of transformation.
The biblical approach to friendship assumes that friendship exists in the messy spaces of life (Prov. 17:17), and that a good friend might even stir up messiness (Prov. 27:6) to fuel our transformation in Christ.
This real friendship requires vulnerability, humility, and courage. And it comes at the cost of our comfort. It’s no surprise, then, to see that Jesus’s command to love one another includes a declaration of the great sacrificial love found in friendship (Jn. 15:12-13). As we experience the meaningful messiness of real friendship, we encounter an extension of the sacrificial love of Jesus that transforms us.
- When we give our friends permission to ask us about anything and commit to giving the honest, ugly answers, we invite the life-changing truth of the gospel into our struggles.
- When we listen to our friends in empathy and don’t treat them as projects to be fixed, we embody the ever-present Redeemer who hears the cries of his people.
- When we share what’s really going on in the hidden corners of our hearts with others—our greatest desires and fears—we grow in our ability to fully surrender to Jesus, and we encourage our friends to do the same.
It’s more comfortable to imagine a pathway to deep friendship without deep sacrifice. But to chase a sacrifice-free friendship is to sacrifice friendship itself. God delights to reveal himself and create meaningful transformation in the messiness of real life and real friendship.
Friends as a Family of Formation
The creator of Friends, Marta Kauffman, described the goal of the show this way: to depict the season of life when your friends are your family.
In some ways, this captures a key element of what biblical friendship is all about. Friendship isn’t meant to compete with the importance of our families, but it is meant to cultivate an ever-deepening capacity to live as the family of God.
When we grow in beautifully mundane, meaningfully messy friendships, we aren’t simply showcasing a sentimentality that could fit within a sitcom. We’re reflecting and radiating the love of God with our sisters and brothers. We’re being formed into a family that receives and shares the love of our Creator and Redeemer.
If this is true, here’s one way to tell that you have good friends: You’re not the same person now as you were 10 years ago. The same should be true 10 years from now.
Because friendships form us as the family of God. If you have friends like this, thank God for the gift of the community you have. If you don’t have friends like this just yet, be the kind of person who pursues people in the mundane and messy areas of life. Don’t wait for the kind of community you need to find you—start cultivating it now.
Exchange the “Friend Zone” for a Garden
To be honest, I feel like a fraud writing about the beauty of friendship. Not because I don’t have friends who live this way—I’m grateful to God that I do. I feel like a fraud because I don’t know that I quite measure up to the intentionality and care that my friends show me. I hope that one day, by God’s grace, I can grow to be the kind of friend to them that they are to me.
My friends are faithful to connect with ordinary intimacy and sacrificial love. They encourage me, challenge me, and spur me on to be more like Jesus. I often feel like I’m not worthy of them. But that’s kind of the point. Our friendship is not a transaction where I need to measure up—it’s a two-way street that leads to transformation as we give and receive the love of Jesus.
Biblical friendship is less like a zone to avoid or endure, and more like a garden to let our roots sink into over time. It’s a shared space where we encounter God together and slowly grow into the kind of people that bear the fruit of his kingdom.
Cultivate your friendships. Keep them mundane. Keep them messy. Through them, God will keep and cultivate you as a part of his family.
Books to Explore Friendship:
- No Greater Love by Rebecca McLaughlin
- Made for People by Justin Whitmel Early
- Find Your People by Jennie Allen
- How to Know a Person by David Brooks
- From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks
- Transformative Friendships by Brad Hambrick
- The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis
- Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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