Finding Great FriendsՕրինակ

It never fails. Whenever I go to God with a problem, He turns it around on me. I am always the problem. Okay, so I’m not always the problem, but more often than I’d like to admit, I have to own a piece of the problem. Sometimes a really big piece.

As my mother used to tell me all the time, “If you want to have friends, you have to be a friend.” What does that look like? Does it mean dropping everything the moment someone calls to run to their side? Does it mean always giving up what you want to do in favor of what they want to do? Does it mean eating where they want? Only going to movies they want to see? Spending time together on their schedule?

Goodness no. That’s the definition of a doormat or a slave or some fancy psychological issue. That is definitely not what being a good friend looks like. Being a good friend means following the Golden Rule that so many of us learned as children. 

It’s really quite simple. Do you want to be listened to? Then be a good listener. Do you want someone to go to your favorite restaurant with you? Then go to someone’s favorite restaurant with them. Do you want someone to acknowledge your birthday with a sweet treat? Then take the time to make or buy some sweet treats for someone else.

Some of you are already rattling off excuses, examples of when you tried this and it didn’t work. The person was selfish or never returned the favor or never even said thank you! Hang in there with me. We’ll get to the other people, I promise. Right now, we’re talking about you.

The kind of thinking that puts others in the forefront of your mind is hard if you aren’t used to it, but it gets easier with practice. The Holy Spirit loves to jump in and help me do this (one of the benefits of asking God for wisdom!). For example, recently, I was going to an out-of-state conference with a couple of friends. A third friend who lived nearby drove up from her house to meet us at our hotel to have dinner, but a fourth friend from yet another state couldn’t make it. 

This fourth friend is very dear to me, and because we live on opposite sides of the country, we rarely see each other. She is also close to two of the other ladies who were at the dinner, so I knew her heart would be missing all of us as we celebrated time together. 

God whispered to me one morning a couple weeks before we left, reminding me how I’d felt when other friends had gone off on a retreat together without me. I was thankful they were getting a refreshing time away, but I still felt left out. Left behind. That bittersweet memory was all it took for me to jump online and find a small gift I could send through the mail to let her know how important she was to me and how much I would miss her presence at the conference.