Friendship... how do we 'be' friends?!

I have been thinking about friendship lately, and what makes a friend a friend...

I am fast coming to a point in my life where things have a possibility got changing massively, I could be moving to anywhere God wishes... and while this is mega (and I never use that word!) exciting, it also could mean massive changes within my friendships and social groups.

While I know even if I do not move away, the group of friends I have built up from Uni really will be disbursing and life will be different dynamic with them.

But this has lead to reflect a lot of what I think friendship means and how that expectancy impacts my friends and social status.... Facebook has been in the news over the past year as one of the biggest ‘things’ of our lives, with millions and millions of pictures and many many many

people adding ‘friends’. I have wondered what does it mean?

Proverbs 12:25 Worry weighs a person down;

an encouraging word cheers a person up.

I personally love facebook, it allows me to panda to my hate for the phone call and still contact someone to say they are loved. It also pandas to my other rather negative elements of my life, my ego... that I have a whole page within a system all about me... I am allowed to tell everyone what I am doing... where I have been and who I have been with. And while I do that on here too, facebook also means my ‘friends’ have to know this information.

Proverbs 12:26 The godly give good advice to their friends;

the wicked lead them astray.

But our friendships just for the interaction? For the self affirmation of each other? I know that friendships shouldn’t be based upon the simple transaction of you do something for me and I do something for you... at church recently we had the discussion of what it meant to give gifts, and that to give something back straight away is almost to snub the original gift... to give is not to expect something back.

And something I/we need to learn over and over, in a world of new and now... don’t we expect the transaction? With that in mind, we can then be a friend to whomever we meet, without even talking to them. Without adding them to our mental facebook friend’s list, we can be a friend in a gesture.

I have a few friends at the moment who are working a lot out in their heads (aren’t we all really?!) and for them (and me) working out how to ‘be’ a friend is one of those things that seems to keep coming up.

Proverbs 12:27 Lazy people don’t even cook the game they catch,

but the diligent make use of everything they find

But maybe we need to fight against the ‘what can I get out of this mode’ consumerist model and ask ‘what can I do for you’? Is this an easy thing to move to? How do we know what we are doing this? Jesus is our example, and he modelled this all his ministry (and life)... being like Jesus is being a friend to all, even if we get the rough and bum deal out of it... that’s hard... but Jesus didn’t say it was easy.

X

LISTENING TO- Goldfrapp- Slide in

Proverbs 12:25-27 (New Living Translation)