Summary:
During a particularly painful time in her life, Sarah Zacharias Davis learned how delightful–and wounding–women can be in friendship. She saw how some friendships end badly, others die slow deaths, and how a chance acquaintance can become that enduring friend you need.
The Friends We Keep is Sarah’s thoughtful account of her own story and the stories of other women about navigating friendship. Her revealing discoveries tackle the questions every woman asks:
• Why do we long so for women friends?
• Do we need friends like we need air or food or water?
• What causes cattiness, competition, and co-dependency in too many friendships?
• Why do some friendships last forever and others only a season?
• How do I foster friendship?
• When is it time to let a friend go, and how do I do so?
• Do we need friends like we need air or food or water?
• What causes cattiness, competition, and co-dependency in too many friendships?
• Why do some friendships last forever and others only a season?
• How do I foster friendship?
• When is it time to let a friend go, and how do I do so?
With heartfelt, intelligent writing, Sarah explores these questions and more with personal stories, cultural references and history, faith, and grace. In the process, she delivers wisdom for navigating the challenges, mysteries, and delights of friendship: why we need friendships with other women, what it means to be safe in relationship, and how to embrace what a friend has to offer, whether meager or generous.
My Thoughts:
In her book, The Friends We Keep, Sarah Zacharias Davis expresses the complex nature of female friendships. This book is an inside look at the varying degrees of friendship and how they all blend together to shape us into the women we’ve become.
Sarah Zacharias Davis references books, plays and movies that capture the depths of friendship. Using many great examples, she writes about the ups and downs that all relationships face. She confront the necessity of betrayal and the conflicts that pull a friendship together and make it stronger than it was.
Again, using wonderful parallels from literature, Sarah lays out the different faces and dimensions of friendship. She addresses the importance of trust in a relationship and the value of respecting the secrets of friendship.
Sarah gives wonderful wisdom on how to be a true friend, not by control and domination, but by quiet questioning and gently holding up a mirror of self examination.
She tackles the sticky subject of forgiveness and I love what she says:
“We forgive because, if all relationships bear a betrayal of some kind, then eventually we, too, will be in need of forgiveness.”
Sarah covers the stages and phases of friendship that travel the length of our lives through awkward self-discover to the forming of who we are and what we will become. It’s the truly special friendship that ride the waves with us.
Readers will learn about soul friendships defined as ” . . .full disclosure, confession, sharing deep wounds and slow healing . . .”
This section is, to me, the most poignant and beautiful description of love.
The Friends We Keep discusses all forms of friendship from seasonal friendship, soul friendship, unplanned friendship and distanced friendship. Friendship is lined up against fictional references, movie references and biblical imagery.
The Friends We Keep is beautifully written. Even the cover is beautiful.
This book would make a wonderful gift for a friend. It contains a detailed discussion guide at the back of the book that leads readers to dig even deeper into the ideas and nature of friendship.
Author Bio:
Sarah Zacharias Davisis a senior advancement officer at Pepperdine University , having joined the university after working as vice president of marketing and development for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and in strategic marketing for CNN. The daughter of best-selling writer Ravi Zacharias, Davis is the author of the critically-acclaimed Confessions from an Honest Wife andTransparent: Getting Honest About Who We are and Who We Want to Be. She graduated from Covenant College with a degree in education and lives in Los Angeles , California .
Want to know more?
You can read an excerpt of The Friends We Keep here.
You can find The Friends We Keep at Christianbook.com for only $9.99. Go here to order.
, August 2009
, August 2009
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