JOE, I KNEW YOU WOULD COME ’…A STORY ON FRIENDSHIP!!!

This is a story from the late Fr. Anthony de Mello, SJ, about friendship.
There were two soldiers, Joe and Carl, who were close friends. It was war time and they were in one company engaged in an encounter. Outnumbered and as they started to suffer heavy casualties, the commander ordered a retreat.
When the company got to safe ground, Joe noti...ced his friend, Carl, was not with them. He went to the commander and asked permission to go back to look for Carl. The commander disapproved, saying that under heavy fire of the enemy, Carl would surely be killed. He told Joe they would recover the bodies when it was safer to do so.
Joe apologized before he disobeyed the order and ran back to the battlefield.
Minutes later he came back carrying Carl’s dead body. As he put down Carl’s body, the company saw that Joe himself was badly wounded now. The commander furiously told Joe, “I told you he would have been killed in the firefight. You foolishly endangered yourself, and now I risk losing another man. What a waste, Joe!”
Joe, now fighting for his own life, calmly told the commander, “Sir, it was not a waste. When I got to Carl he was still alive. I held him up and propped him on my lap telling him to hold on. He gasped for breath, he smiled, and his last and only words were, ‘’Joe, I knew you would come.”
FROM OBY: When was the last time you inconvenienced yourself for that man/woman you call a friend? Ok, let me rephrase...when was the last time a friend said THANK YOU to you? Has a friend’s HOPE in your integrity been unabashed? When it comes to friendship, the only words MOST of us understand are TAKE, TAKE AND TAKE…the word GIVE is alien to a lot of us. Perhaps we should understand that FRIENDSHIP is also SACRIFICE. If you can’t remember the last time you said a heartfelt THANK YOU(in your challenges) to that friend of yours…find out if he still takes you as you take him. Let’s begin to redefine FRIENDSHIP-friendship (if gotten right) is priceless. Be the kind of FRIEND you want to meet…the efforts should begin with you. Many of us have an idea of the kind of friend we want to meet but very few of us make the efforts to be that kind of friend-to someone else.