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Just think of all the things that one would want from a friend. What is a true friend like? I suppose that all of us have a sense of what we most value in friendship: trust, honesty, generosity, faithfulness - and forgiveness. Above all, a friend is someone we can count on just to be there when we are most in need.

Of course, it would be a one-sided friendship - maybe no true friendship at all - if one person did all the giving and the other all the taking.

We know that Jesus told His disciples that He no longer calls them slaves, but friends (Jn 15:15). These words have profound implications.

We know from the catechism that we are meant to "know, love and serve God" in this world and be happy with Him in heaven. It is true that God does not owe us anything and certainly deserves our honor, worship and respect.

Jesus, however, invites us not to think of our relationship with God primarily as one of fearful submission to duties and obligations, but as an ongoing relationship, a conversation, an exchange of loving actions. If we accept what Jesus is offering, then how will it change our attitudes about our faith?

It is fairly common for many of us to see our faith as a difficult burden. We are aware of the demands that discipleship places on us in terms of how we live our moral lives: the discipline of going to Mass every Sunday, observing the laws of the Church on marriage, our attitudes toward possessions and those who do not have what we have, our respect for our sexuality and that of others - all this and more present challenges to how well we are living the Gospel.

Jesus, however, invites us to consider everything we do as an act of love for Him - as a friend - not just a chore.

Consider that the Word, who really had everything before He became incarnate (in some ways, it is He who was the "rich" young man mentioned in the Gospel!), has given us everything that He had, even to the point of making the supreme sacrifice of dying for us.

There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. He is not asking us to be perfect, but to be faithful. Being faithful means living our life for Jesus as our friend, no different from the way in which we would go out of our way to do anything for the good of a friend on earth.

If we could see living the Christian life as a way of befriending Jesus, what a difference it would make. Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me" (cf. Mt 25:40). Imagine a world in which there were more people treating other people the way God treats us: with kindness, attentiveness, undivided attention and unbounded forgiveness.

Love is really the one rule of the Christian life, and it is on the extent to which we have loved that, ultimately, we will be judged.

In order to know if we are living our faith, the only question we need to be asking ourselves is how good a friend are we to Jesus. What He wants from us is not any payback - we cannot possibly do that - or a lot of things, but that we live out His dream for us.

That dream is that each and every one of us will become a saint, beginning with living a life here on earth that is full of grace and goodness, eager to give and forgive, generous with our talents and time, open to being instruments of God's peace.

Another way of saying this is that if Jesus is the Savior that the world is looking for and really needs, then we are those friends of Jesus who will lead others to know and love Him. True friends are never shy about singing the praises and virtues of their friends. So everything that we do as friends of Jesus is meant to reveal His glory and honor.

That is why a Christian has no time for gossip, resentment, revenge, spitefulness - and all the other petty and useless devices that soap operas and telenovelas are full of.

We are, as St. Paul reminds us, citizens of heaven. As friends of Jesus, we want to show the world the kind of life and love that all of us, deep down, really want to have. With a friend like Jesus always at our side, there is nothing to stop us from living His dream.[[In-content Ad]]

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