“When upon Life’s Billows”: Take a Friend | Beth Vaughan Cole | 2008

Beth Vaughan Cole teaches that friendship is one of the greatest blessings we can have. Friends provide comfort and counsel and help us feel loved.

This devotional was given on April 8, 2008.

Read the speech here: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/beth-vaughan-cole/upon-lifes-billows-take-friend/

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"Thank you, Vice President Rogers, for your kind introduction. The music was beautiful. Brothers and sisters, honored guests, my esteemed colleagues and staff, and my dear, treasured students: welcome. It is an honor to be speaking to you today.

Many of you were present on January 15 of this year when President Henry B. Eyring gave his address about the trials that people face over a lifetime. He named three:

First: We can feel overcome with pain and sorrow at the death of a loved one.

Second: Each of us will struggle against fierce opposition—some of which comes from dealing with our physical needs and some from enemies.

Third: Each of us who live past the age of accountability will feel the need to escape from the effects of sin. [“The Power of Deliverance,” BYU devotional, 15 January 2008]

Every loving parent and every loving adult in this room would like to protect you from the harsh trials that life will present to you, but we know no one who has escaped the difficult vicissitudes of life. We want you to be strong. We want you to know how to manage any difficulty that might come your way. We want you to be resilient when you are faced with life’s trials. How do we help you develop those qualities? We can’t and shouldn’t make all your choices for you—that will not make you strong. So we give to you what wisdom we have gleaned along our paths through life. My task today is to share with you some of that wisdom.

Over the past 10 years I have been involved in the lives of people who have experienced the death of a loved one. Helping them address the grief and bereavement and adjustments in their lives has been a tender, spiritual, and inspiring experience. As President Eyring noted, we will all have trials. Some of them will be to adjust to the deaths of loved ones in our lives.

David Balk’s research at Kansas State University reports that 25 percent of college students experienced the death of a family member in the past year and that 30 percent experienced the death of a friend in that same time period (see David E. Balk and Laura C. Vesta, “Psychological Development During Four Years of Bereavement: A Longitudinal Case Study,” Death Studies 22, no. 1 [January–February 1998]: 23–41). Mild, moderate, or severe grief can interfere with learning, with interpersonal relationships, and with sleeping, eating, and personal growth. Death is the last taboo of our American society. We can talk about it in the third person, and we can talk about it in movies, textbooks, and literature, but it is still very difficult to talk about it in everyday life. Many people will need a friend or friends during difficult times—they’ll need someone they can talk to about the trials they are experiencing.

I have entitled my talk “‘When upon Life’s Billows’: Take a Friend.” Many of you are familiar with Johnson Oatman Jr.’s hymn “Count Your Blessings.” The first verse is:

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings; name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

[Hymns, 1985, no. 241]

Friendship is one of the greatest blessings we can have. Our friends provide comfort and counsel. They accept—or at least tolerate—our peculiarities and often laugh spontaneously at our jokes. Most of all, they are really quite forgiving of our imperfections.

A dear friend gave me a bowl decorated with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It says, “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature” (“Friendship,” Essays: First Series [1841]). In truth, a friend may well be a divine masterpiece. Professionally, I have worked as a college faculty member in psychiatric–mental health nursing. I have studied human relationships and health for decades. Research from the past 30 years on social support and health offers strong evidence for a positive relationship between social support and the outcomes of many health-related variables. Friendships, along with kinship or family relationships, are the most researched social relationships. Today I want to focus on friendship."

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