This past Monday, I was fortunate enough to spend a part of the day at Assiniboine Park. Shannon and I were there with Noelle in the children’s play area, to the right of the pavilion as you come in the main entrance. It is a great place for kids, I suspect mainly because it adheres to the old notions of what makes play fun, where the more dangerous something is the better. There is a giant cement hill with all of an eighth inch of rubber on it for protection but mainly grip. There is some slick and wet concrete waterworks for children to climb and run on, and hopefully when they inevitably slip, land on their backsides instead of their teeth. Most strikingly, there is a 30-foot pirate lookout complete with rope net rigging sans any form of protective railing for children as young as are mobile to scamper up, giggling the whole time. While province-wide, playgrounds have continued to get tamed down due to safety concerns, the brave designers of this magnificent limb-splitting wonderland took a wholly opposite approach, and my four-year-old daughter loves the outcome with all of her being.

But I suspect the thing that Noelle loves more than any particular installation in the park is the people. This is predicated on how not long after we got there, she did as she always does when we are at a park with other kids her age and immediately booked it to the nearest group of children. The parents were all standing and sitting around, distanced, wearing masks, but when we looked over to see if they minded that this wee stranger was playing with their children, it was made clear quickly it was not a problem before we all went back to our own little worlds while our children proceeded to run up that 30-foot mast.

I wonder, is it a sociological reason that causes us to lose this ability of children to just instantly make new friends? A situational one? When I was younger, I remember having this skill. Once at a theme park I sat next to a kid from Bristol on a roller coaster. By our parting at the end of the five minutes that ride took, we knew each other’s favourite hobbies and life aspirations, only to never see one another again. But at some point in high school, I dare say I lost that ability nearly completely. What it was for me, as I suspect it is also for most other adults, is that I had my group of friends, and so I figured I was set. Why bother making new friends when I didn’t have time for them anyway. And so it is that one year I can remember running out and making new friends with anyone else on the playground, and then the next I was one of those adults in my own little world standing on the sidelines as the younger children continued to laugh and play.

The Bible has plenty to say on the importance of having friends. If you want a rather lengthy list of individual verses on the subject, feel free to click here. By my count (at least before I decided there were better things to be spending my time than counting items on a list), there are well over a hundred verses on the topic. Passages about how you can see the work of God through friendship. Passages about how friendship leads to wisdom. Passages about being friends with God. Passages about how the church is to be built on the bond of friendship. There are verses on all of these topics and more in the Bible, and I dare say that kind of presents a bit of a problem.

Because if friendship is such an important thing as to warrant that much biblical discussion, that this is the approach so many of us adults take to making new friends, an approach that says, ‘we have our groups and so we don’t really see the need to reach out anymore,’ this is an issue. And it’s an issue because, somewhat obviously, it closes us off to the possibility of actually making new friends.

Now, it is not that the Bible calls us all of us to all be social butterflies, each with groups of friends too numerous to keep track of - although if you are an adult who can do that, then kudos to however you are managing it - but instead our faith absolutely calls us to be open and welcoming to new people, quick to address their needs, which has to include bringing them into the group if that is what they are lacking. Now, how does that outward focus jive with how many of us adults act around new people? Where we are in our own little world most of the time because we simply do not have space in our lives for anyone else? Imagine being a person in need in our town. You need something to get by and likely aren’t looking for lifelong best friends, and so you approach the church to see if they can help, to which you are simply met with an indifferent wall. A wall that maybe puts on a veneer of “friendliness”, but is clearly disinterested in getting to know you as a person all the same. What will that do to your opinion of that church and the people inside?

I wonder if we adults cannot learn a little something from children on this one. Because by my experience, they seem to have mastered exactly this problem. Noelle has her friends who would be what we think of as her ‘core group’, the kids she sees on a somewhat regular basis, but when she is with other children, new children she has never met before in her life, it takes maybe a handful of minutes and then they are playing together as if they had been thick as thieves all their lives. And then when it comes time for this fun to be over, for everyone to go their own separate ways never to be seen again, it just is.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if she can do this so well because she doesn’t really have that concept of “what comes next,” that we adults seem so often to get stranded in. To her, being friends with other kids is something you do because that is what is done. Long-term questions about if she has time in her schedule or the emotional ability to have more friends than she currently does, don’t really matter because in the here and now that dangerous 30-foot pirate’s mast is in front of her and the rest of the group of kids are already on their way up. Although I highly doubt she has given the matter a lot of thought, in this I suspect there may be brilliance. Because while I dare say that everyone has that want to be treated like a friend, like an actual worthwhile human being to be around when they are in new circumstances, especially in difficult ones, I suspect the number of those same people who are actually on the prowl for new close and lifelong friends is actually somewhat limited. Yet for some reason it is for the fear of just that unlikelihood that so many of us adults find ourselves shutting out, or treating new people distantly, entirely. A concept that at least to my daughter, and every other four-year-old I have ever met, would likely simply be met with one of the accidentally wisest puzzled stares to ever cross a person’s face.

So maybe this is the wisdom the young ones in our lives can teach us on just this subject: approach friendship with other people as a four-year-old would. Treat everyone you meet as if they are your friend. If something longer term comes from that, then what will happen will happen. But even if you go your separate ways in life, never to see one another again, at least for that brief time, you got to know the biblical wisdom found in living like a child again.