Khalil Gibran wrote: “Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.” What is Creator’s perspective?

This is a quite human-level response to the difficulties of life, including the challenges in cultivating and maintaining friendship with anyone, no matter the inherent compatibility and sharing of perspectives, backgrounds, interests, and even passions. No two people are alike and no two people will always be in sync with their thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Each life has a tempo and many constraints and sources of input, positive or negative, so sharing time with a friend will always involve a varied state of being in terms of both participants. The strength of friendship will determine to what degree this can be overcome and even put on hold if need be, to spend productive time with one another and not risk having the friendship get bogged down with complicated issues beyond the ability of the other party to truly fix. But the true test of friendship is whether a would-be friend rises to the occasion at a time of suffering or difficulty—will they abandon you? Will they be sympathetic? Will they offer assistance even in a material way beyond sympathy, but volunteer time or money to help you through a crisis? It is the tenor of the times that governs the nature of friendships with respect to the pluses and minuses. In a world of suffering and chaos and discord and strife, your relationship with others, especially friends for whom you care and have a sense of obligation because they have given in like measure to you of themselves, too many outside demands and difficult circumstances can make friends as much a liability as an asset when resources are scarce, time is fleeting, and one is already overburdened with one's own concerns. To have a friend approach you in need when you are already overburdened and overcommitted, and becoming seriously depleted in energy and inner resolve, can be quite trying and could even be damaging or even catastrophic and trigger a bigger sacrifice than foreseen. So this author was seeing the issue of friendship more in that kind of setting than simply when friendship comes along to those who are reasonably stable and unconstrained severely, and in that setting it becomes a spice, an added bonus of life, a kind of pleasant reward to have something wonderful as a kind of present bestowed that enhances the being and serves as a further completion of things that may have already been at least neutral but now can be more positive than before, and that, of course, represents an opportunity always present in what one human can bring to another. This will always involve some give and take if it is a true friendship and not subservience, but we would say, friendship, on balance, is much more a blessing than a curse because it is the essence of the divinity in you on display, and exercising it will always be rewarding to you and those who share the bounty of your friendship.