I grew up with two amazing sisters: Kendra the oldest, Richelle the middle child, and myself, Scott the youngest. So thinking about brotherhood is often a difficult topic for me. I didn’t have brothers. Brotherhood was something relatively absent from my childhood. My sisters are awesome and I love them, but the relationships I have observed between brothers are distinctly different than my relationships with my sisters. The way you connect with a brother is different, and this was something that I desperately wanted growing up.
My desire for a true brother didn’t stop with my childhood. I had a few close friends in high school who were brother like and one in particular, Justin, who I did almost everything with. My first tastes of brotherhood came from him. We were brutally honest with each other and at times we were really angry with each other, but we could fight it out and go on knowing that at the end of the day, we would still have each others backs. We would stay up really late talking about girls and practical jokes we planned on playing on people and occasionally we would talk about God and what he meant to us and how we saw him working in our lives. It really was a great friendship. Unfortunately we decided to go to college in very different parts of the country. He went to Michigan , I moved to San Diego
College brought about an entirely new set of issues with brotherhood. Early on in my college career, I joined a fraternity and one of the things I was most excited about was this concept of brotherhood that they all talk so much about. My dad was in a fraternity and told me that some of his best friends even still he met in his fraternity days, and on the surface, the Greek system talks a lot about brotherhood. The brotherhood I found there was not what I had hoped. Sure I would hang out with the guys at parties, or at “brotherhood” events, but what I saw was a bunch of really awesome people make decisions that ultimately drove them away from intimacy in the name of brotherhood. Brotherhood in the Greek system often looks like spending time together drinking and then going to do crazy things. It is based on a false intimacy that says since we are experiencing these things together we are brothers, but I quickly learned that this is not true. Jack and Judith Balswick say that “Intimacy can be defined as a mutual knowing and caring free of embarrassment or shame.” It means that your name is safe in the other person’s mouth. I would hear people claim to be brothers one minute then intentionally disrespect their so called brother the next. I would watch Cain kill Able then look God in the face and ask “Am I my brother’s keeper?” I learned very quickly that true brotherhood in the Greek system would be hard to come by.
It was then that I moved in with a group of guys who would teach me what real brotherhood looks like. At first there were four of us. Andrew, Jamin, Scott, and I and later on we would add in Kevin, Carson and Eugene. With these six other guys I have learned what it means to have brothers. We live together, we fight with each other we stay up late and talk about girls, but we also care deeply for each other. We are there to support each other through the good times and the bad. They are more than willing to call me out on my crap, and I try to do the same for them. In the past three years no one has made me as angry as these six guys have, and in the past three years, no one has brought me as much joy. We are honest with each other, brutally honest. We share our lives together. If something has happened in any of our lives, good or bad, the other guys we live with are among the first to know about it and we are able to come around each other in prayer and with grace in order to build each other up. These guys have become more than friends to me.
Proverbs 17:17 says that “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.”
There is a distinction here. A friend will always have your back, but a brother is someone that you struggle alongside of. You experience adversity together. There is more than just sympathy for a hard time, more than just kind words. A brother stands by you through thick and thin and marches into your battles with you, and carries you when you find the road ahead of you too difficult to keep going.
The story of David and Jonathan in the Bible is a beautiful picture of what Biblical brother hood actually is. Jonathan protected David from his enemies, even when David was the enemy of Jonathan’s father. We are given an image of these two men laughing together, crying together, and sharing an intimacy largely unknown in western culture. There bond was strong to the point that even after Jonathan had been killed in battle, and David had taken the throne from Jonathan’s father, David took it upon himself to care for Jonathan’s only remaining son, a man who was “crippled in both feet,” as if he was one of his own sons (2 Samuel 9). It is clear that though David and Jonathan were indeed examples of the Proverb. Even in the greatest adversities, and even in death, David was there to care for Jonathan, and Jonathan for David.
This is God’s desire for brotherhood: that we care for one another in a sacrificial manner; that we come along each other through the thick and thin and fight for each other in times of adversity.
Growing up with sisters was great. I have been shaped and formed into who I am partially because of their influence on me and I know that they will always be there to support me when I need it, but there is something undeniably good and distinctly different about living with the brothers that I have now. It is a special bond that cannot be manufactured artificially, and one that takes a lot of work to maintain, but when we do, I have experienced that it is more than worth the effort I’ve put in, and all of my relationships have been strengthened by it. You cannot lose. I honestly believe that it is something that God truly desires for us.
