We sat in the car pondering our frustrations, fears and hopes for the coming year. My best friend and I had just found out that we would be prefects and the pressure was beginning to set in. “It’s nonsense man,” Pierre said while I clench and unclench my hands on the steering wheel, “we got to step up our game. We need to decide right now, to promise that we will be by each other’s side twenty-four-seven. We got to get on that David-Jonathan level relationship, bro.” I smiled and nodded in full agreement. We needed to make sure that our bond was strong enough to withstand anything because we had work to do.

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The David and Jonathan that Pierre was referring to came from the Bible. David was a shepherd boy who was anointed by God to be next king of Israel and Jonathan was the son of the current king, Saul. You might think that this would cause these two men to be rivals but that could not be further from the truth. Meeting after a victory against the Philistines a bond forms between these two unlikely men that changes the course of Israel’s history. They confided in each other, sacrificed for each other and openly confessed brotherly love for one another.

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“You get me on a soul level, and we are gonna need that deep level of friendship if we are going to get through this coming year properly. None of this C level friendship, we need to get to A and stay there.” He wasn’t so much telling me as speaking my own thoughts out loud, as I nodded, interjecting with a, “yeah man,” of “Mhmm,” every now and again.

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We didn’t so much as adopt the style of friendship displayed by David and Jonathan as realise that we already had begun to reflect it and so just decided to lean into it. That day in the car we decided to make a promise, like our biblical counter parts, that we would love each other more than ourselves and that no matter what, we would have each other’s back, till the day we died.