The Company You Keep. Yes, You.

My daughter was homeschooled through high school, but she didn’t fit in very well with her agemates at our homeschool co-op. Nor did she fit in with her classmates at church, who all went to the same private school together, and who formed a tight-knit group. She found her closest friends among the other teens from her theater group. They were a smart bunch, hard-working and dedicated, spending hours each week learning lines, blocking, new skills from sword-fighting to dancing, and showing up to build sets and tear them down after closing night. They held their own among college students and adults from the community, keeping their grades and their spirits up in spite of the fact that in the other parts of their world—school, mainly—they were the outcasts, the kids who were visibly out of step. For that, they paid a price.

I didn’t disapprove of my daughter, or her friends, but when you’re a teenager, it can sometimes feel like you’re drowning in a miasma of cultural disapproval: an ugly prevailing wind of “kids these days” disgust. Even if she didn’t feel it at home, Ash definitely felt it. It’s hard to miss a message that crosses over so freely from the church to the culture and back: the apostle Paul quoted the Greek playwright Menander, and even non-Christians will quote Paul. “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’”

“Do you think my friends are a bad influence?” she asked.

“I think it’s the wrong question,” I said. Asking the question the way we commonly do suggests, first of all, that only others are capable of being “bad company.” For Christians to point fingers—to fail to begin from a place of introspection, of careful probing for the log in our own eye—never leads to anything good. We do far too much of it, and mire ourselves in the sand traps of pride and self-righteousness. We become the praying Pharisee: I thank you, Lord, that I am not like this tax collector.

I turned the question around: “Do you think you’re a good influence on your friends?”

She considered this.

“Take it further,” I suggested. “Do you make each other better people? Are you kinder, humbler, more generous, more peaceable, more patient, because of your friends?”

If those things are true, then probably your kid and their friends are okay.

If those things are not true, then it may be time to rethink those relationships.

But here’s another odd thing: the idea that our relationships—in Menander’s parlance, the company we keep—can be wholesome and healing, or damning and damaging, is something that we apply almost exclusively to teens. Are we, as adults, somehow beyond the need to consider the effect our relationships have on us? Are we not liable to be influenced for good or ill by the people around us? As adults, maybe we need to ask ourselves the same question our young people feel in the air they breathe: Do I make the people around me better versions of themselves—or worse? Do the people in my life bring out the best in me—or the worst?

Consider your relationships at work. I once worked for an ambitious firm. There was certainly pressure to make things “turn out” the way the client wanted, for the sake of the firm. I never liked it, but it was hard to resist. The day my boss asked me about a set of test results and I shrugged and said, “I don’t know, what does the client expect us to find?” I knew the relationship was no good. In the end, I walked away.

Consider your familial relationships. Do you and your spouse bring out the best in one another, or the worst? Are you a good influence on your children, or a bad one? What about your relationships with parents, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews: are you bad company? Are they? There can come a point where an oppressive influence in your life or marriage can begin to turn you into someone you don’t want to be. What happens on the day you look in the mirror and decide you don’t like what you see? What happens when survival has warped your personality and your values?

You can’t change the other person, you can only change yourself. You can take steps to change yourself into someone you do not have to be ashamed of. Unfortunately, this can reveal weaknesses in your relationship: some relationships are too damaged, too damned to withstand the pressure of one person’s determined change for the better.

No one ever said walking away from a morally corrupting relationship would be easy.

Maybe that’s why we only lay this burden on teens. We perceive their relationships as transient anyway. Our relationships—with jobs, spouses, friends—are often so entangled that we choose not to look closely at them, rather than to disentangle ourselves.

But that’s precisely why we need to.

Motes and beams, indeed.