Genuine Friendship

Last night, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the value of genuine friendship. We talked about how hard it is to come by, and how we diligently seek it out, and cling to it when it is found.

It strikes me as odd that such a friendship would be hard to find in the church, but is. There are so many people in the church who have an skewed idea of friendship. We have a tendency as humans to seek friendship out of selfishness. What I mean by that is that we seek out friendships to serve our own ends, whether it’s to cure our own loneliness, or for some use that is beneficial to us. But this isn’t genuine friendship.

Genuine friendship is born out of a desire for true fellowship. We were created to build relationships with the people around us, and when we seek to do that in a way that is glorifying to God and is out of a desire for a pure form of fellowship, it breeds this genuine friendship.

Another key ingredient to this rare friendship is love, and I think it’s safe to say that many of us have a very skewed sense of what love is. In 1 John 4:8, we see that Love is Christ. Love comes from Christ, and its only through Christ that we discover this love.

So, genuine friendship is born out of a desire for true, Godly fellowship, and bound with love discovered through Christ.

I think when we grasp these concepts and we find and make these friendships, it makes us stronger in the end. We have someone who’s there to help us in our daily walk, someone to help us up when we fall, and to cheer us on as we succeed. We also have someone there to help keep us accountable.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

        -Proverbs 10:17

I want to be that kind of friend. I want to be someone who pursues true fellowship and loves with a love that can only come from Christ. Someone who my friends can rely upon, both for support and accountability.

I want to be a true friend.

When Plans Change

One of the earliest questions kids get asked as they are growing is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” From the time we are old enough to form sentences till around 10 or 11, that answer usually is “a firefighter”, or “a police officer”, or “a soldier.” From pre-school till I was about 10 years old, the answer for me was always “a pizza man”. I loved pizza. It was my favorite food. I used to beg for pizza almost every night. Naturally, I wanted to be a pizza man. I wanted to throw the dough the old fashioned way. I wanted to make kids smile when I made their favorite pizza.

That, of course, changed as I got older (if you are reading this and you are still inspiring to be a pizza man, please do not feel offended). My dad introduced me to computers at a young age and since then I’ve been fascinated with them. I learned my way around them quickly, and decided that I wanted to fix computers. This pleased my parents, since I can make good money doing that, and it was something I loved to do.

I started college and began pursuing a degree in Information Systems, which would help me achieve my ultimate goal. I’m currently near the end of that degree program. I’m on the edge of jumping head first into the career that I’ve wanted since I was 11. One might say that I have my future already determined and planned.

But I’d like to hit the brakes on this for awhile. I think I was planning all of this without input from God.

I picked up My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers and started reading through it. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about the book and she told me to check out a couple of devotionals from earlier this month, so I did. These particular devotionals talked about the danger of planning without God in the picture.

These passages really gripped at me. You know, my whole life, I’ve known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what I’ve wanted to do with my future, but I went through some serious life-changing experiences in the past few months, and these caused me to rethink everything that I planned.

It made me realize that all of my planning didn’t really take into account what God might want me to do. Oswald wrote in those devotionals that when we plan without God in the picture, He often brings us into experiences that cause us to rethink our plans, and I’m convinced that this is what happened to me.

Where I was so sure before, doubt now lingers above my head like a cloud.

Where is my future going? Right now, I have no idea, but I have every intention of including God in those plans.

Pray for me. Pray that I can allow God to be the chief motivator of my decisions and that I’ll do what’s best for Him, which is ultimately what’s best for me.

Prayer

A few years ago when I graduated high school, a friend and mentor of mine gave me two gifts: a UL t-shirt, and a book called My Utmost for His Highest. It’s a fancy leather-bound, gold-paged edition. I never picked it up and read it. A couple of years later, I worked with a mission team in Alaska, and was given a copy of this same book by the team leader. Again, I never picked it up and read it.

Over the past few months, excerpts from this book have presented themselves to me several times, and for the first time, I picked up the book last night and began to seriously read it. The devotion for June 16th was about Prayer. I carefully read through it, and it opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Here’s the part that jumped out at me:

“Prayer is not only asking, but is an attitude of the mind which produces the atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural.”

How many times do we as Christians attempt to “pray” without having an attitude of prayer? Stop yourself and seriously think about this: When you pray, are you really in the mindset necessary to come before God and ask Him a question naturally?

Remember: it’s “an attitude of the mind”, not just coming before God and making your request. Attitude matters.