Friendship

So this past week I spoke on being a friend and having the right friends in your life. It’s one of your basic needs and you will either choose to have them or your circumstances will default you to whoever is around. I encouraged you to deepen your relationships with your friends through the ABC’s of friendship. “A” being acquaintances, “B” being brotherly or blood related to “C” for close or deeply committed, I’m going to give you eight things that you can apply to your life, that will help you enter the “C” relationship:

1. Be real.

No relationship can ever get to a “C” level unless there is realness to it. Yet we often live without it, like this nurse who was over in the Persian Gulf, who wrote a letter to her mother. “Mom, I’ve seen a fellow here I’d really like to get to know. But they won’t let us wear makeup so he doesn’t have any idea what I really look like.” Wow, how true! How many of us go through life with makeup, facade, coverings? How many times do we walk through life with these facades and these barriers and people really never get to know who we really are?

2. Be realistic.

In any relationship, you have to be realistic. You have to understand that there is a certain amount of public image everybody puts out in any kind of a relationship. Especially in the beginning. It’s called, “putting our best foot forward.” What happens in that relationship is that you have to understand not only do you do that, but the other person does it also.

Now, the “C” level gets to a place where we don’t always have to put the best foot forward. Now, what I want you to understand is to have a realism about your relationship. There will be times when your friend will let you down and that understanding brings the realism to an acceptable reality. There has to be realism, without it we get stuck in point 1

3. Be affirmative.

Affirm others. Remember this about people: Every person that you see has an invisible sign around their neck that says, “Make me feel important.” The moment that you begin to make others feel important about themselves, I will promise you that you will begin to develop a friendship.

4. Be available.

Relationships are built on availability. We live close enough to the ocean to realize that sharks swim in schools and so do dolphins. But we also know the difference between sharks and dolphins. When a shark is wounded, what do the other sharks do? They kill it, they attack it. When a dolphin is wounded, instead of attacking a dolphin, the dolphins gather around the hurt dolphin and nurture it and carry it until they can bring it to some place of healing or some place of safety and protect the injured dolphin from other animals. When we make ourselves available to others we gather around them, often during their time of need.

5. Be balanced in your relationship.

This I know, in this world there are a bunch of unbalanced people. Unbalanced in that they expect to get when they never give, yet for a relationship to be whole there must be give and take on both sides. A relationship can’t be all giving and a relationship can’t be all taking. There has to be a balance. So this means you have to learn the art of closeness and giving space at the same time.

6. Be growing in your relationship.

Grow your relationship. I can promise you today; any relationship that doesn’t continue to last is a relationship where one has grown and the other hasn’t. It’s almost a slam dunk guarantee. See if you don’t grow together, you grow apart. It’s that simple.

7. Be grateful.

Be grateful for your relationships. Express that gratitude. Don’t take friendships for granted folks. They are too few and too precious for you to run over your friends. Do not take them for granted. Listen, quit waiting for a crisis to express your appreciation. Cut that foolishness out. Grow up. Start expressing love now. You’ve only got today. Tomorrow is a promissory note and yesterday’s a cancelled check.

8. Be a friend of God’s.

I closed my message on Sunday with this point and gave you some tremendous words that I will repeat here: “There is a tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me. There is certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow men do not see. ...and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself... He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.”

“The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” (Exodus 33:11)

“And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend.” (James 2:23)