Introduction to the Devout Life: Third Part--Chapter 20

Journeying With The Saints

Fellow Pilgrims, welcome back for another great reading from St. Francis de Sales. We are still on the topic of friendship and like I said in a previous episode, St. Francis really covers this topic very thoroughly. This is good because not enough people talk about healthy and holy friendships.

In fact, I think it’s a topic that we don’t talk about with our kids enough. Oftentimes, we wait until its too late to discuss friendship. When our kids are little, we steer them away from other kids we don’t see as good influences for our children. We often don’t tell them why, though. We just draw a boundary line.

Then, when our kids move into their teens and they get around friends we don’t find good for them, we try to get them to end the friendship, but they buck against us. We haven’t taught them what to look for in a friend and how to pick up on warning signs.

Most people believe that a good friend is just someone that you share interests with and that is like-minded in beliefs. That’s not what makes a good friend.

I’ve had really good friends that I’ve dumped because they tried to charitably correct my behavior and they didn’t agree with everything I was doing. I thought this made them a bad friend because they weren’t “on my side.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’ve also been on the flip-side of this where I tried to call a friend to higher standard and it was not well received. We’ll talk about that after we hear St. Francis talk about the difference between true and false friendships. Let’s open our books to Chapter Twenty of the Third Part.