Make One. Be One.

I think it's important for us to recognize, and if you walk away with anything today, it's that friendships require work.

They require investment.

So we are in America facing what is called a friendship recession.

Let me give you some statistics.

The Survey Center on American Life did an exhaustive survey in 2021, and here's the data on the change from 1990 to 2021 over those 30 years.

In 1990, 3% of Americans surveyed said they had no friends.

In 2021, that number was 12%.

The survey center did a smaller follow-up in 2014, 2024 rather, and that number had risen again to 17% of the people said they had no friends.

The surveys in 1990, 4% said they had only one friend.

In 2021, that number had nearly doubled to 7%.

In 1990, 27% of people said they had three or fewer friends.

By 2021, that number had risen to 49%.

Even at the top end of the scale, in 1990, 33% of Americans said they had 10 or more good friends.

In 2021, that number had fallen to only 13%.

The number of friends that we have is declining.

You know, when we have these memorial services where lots of church people come together, it is this really ambivalent feeling because on the one hand, it's really joyous to see all these people who have gathered to express their love for someone who's passed away.

And on the other hand, people will say to me, all my friends are dying.

I don't have as many friends as I used to.

And we've got to stop meeting like this.

And that is the truth.

We can feel incredibly lonely and feel like we don't have friends.

So we can go through all of the social reasons, the internet and social media and all this stuff to make us think why that's the case.

But I think it's more important to think about how we can address the issue.

And I thought we might look at this amazing, beautiful story of Jonathan and David in the Old Testament to maybe see what we can learn.