What About Your Friends?

"Be not deceived, bad company corrupts good morals" 1 Corinthians 15:33

When I was growing up in elementary and junior high, I had a hard time finding good friends. At that age, it was more important to me to be friends with someone cool, pretty, or popular, then someone kind, honest, and with good morals. I remember getting in several arguments with my mother about the friends I chose to spend time with. I can still hear her saying “I don’t want you hanging out with that girl. She’s a bad influence on you. You are not allowed to go and spend time with her this weekend. NO!” I would be so livid at my mother, thinking “you can’t pick who my friends are! You don’t know anything! You are sooo mean mom!” Well thank God for my mother. I have carried those high standards through to my adult life, and I am now surrounded by the most genuine, honest, stand-up, life-long girlfriends a girl could ever ask for.  You see, when I was younger I thought it was more important to have 100 “friends” to have fun with and be seen with, because I thought it would make my life seem more fun and fulfilling. As I got older, I realized it truly is quality over quantity, and that the friends you choose to surround yourself with really does play a major role in your future success and quality of life.

Time is such a precious commodity in our lives. We have barely enough time to eat and sleep properly, let alone spend any quality time with our friends. Time is valuable. Time is a gift you can give to someone. Who are you spending your time with? Who do you value in your life? Apart from spending time with my husband and family, I personally choose to spend my spare time nurturing those friendships that continue to grow and blossom, with those friends that are for life.

The old saying is true, people do come into your life for either a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Your future happiness and quality of life strongly rely on your ability to decipher what person fits into which place in your life. I’ve spent many unfortunate years hanging desperately onto partners that were only there for a particular reason (to learn). I’ve also enjoyed summers and winters and entire school-years with wonderful friends that were placed in my life for a short season. Think carefully about who are your LIFETIME people, and chose to prioritize your time with them.

Just as relationships can be toxic and unhealthy, so can friendships. Friendships are relationships just like any other. They are a two-way street, and involve trust, compromise, understanding, honesty, and integrity. Friendships are give and take. Ideally, friendships are a gift from God, given to help you grow, to pick you up when you are weak, to cheer you on when you are rising, to build your character.  Hanging onto unhealthy friendships can cause negative impact on your life. They may hold you back from growing and excelling, they stunt your growth. They may criticize or make fun of you as you make positive changes in your life. When a friendship becomes one-sided, or unhealthy in any way, have the courage to realize that taking a step away and creating boundaries and distance is a very wise decision.

I’ve heard of several instances of people that were on a path to healing from past addictions. As they got clean, they often lost many friends, and found themselves lonely. The friends they had while struggling with addictions no longer had anything in common with them as they went clean. Sometimes, those friends would even discourage them from quitting, and put pressure on them to have “just one more” and to lighten up. The results of keeping these friendships are obvious. In my case personally, as I got older and stronger in my faith, I had firmly in place a set of moral codes and standards that I chose not to sway from. It became crucial to me to surround myself only with people that would hold me accountable to those morals – and not lead me in the other direction.  I had a tough job of establishing boundaries and distance to those people that I felt were unhealthy for me to spend time with, those that would possibly lead me astray, or into a situation that is tempting and against what I now morally allow into my life.

With all of this being said, please take to heart that it does not mean you should be rude to people that were once your friends, or to be disrespectful or unloving in any way to someone who has different beliefs than you. We are called to be the Light of the world, and to love your neighbour! It’s not wrong to hang out with people that are on a bad path, that need a good friend, and to be a positive influence in their life. Rather, it’s more important to have the awareness of what sort of role people are playing in your life, and to maintain your boundaries, and choose how you spend your time wisely.

I cannot say enough about the quality of friends I have in my life. A very small group of women, that have seen me through many of life’s battles. They shared countless fun times with me, they have picked me up off the ground and dusted me off, they challenged me, they helped me to grow, they taught me things about myself and about life, they made me a stronger more patient and compassionate person, they were my biggest supporters when I stepped out into my faith, and they were there wiping tears of joy at my wedding when I moved forward into the next stage of my life. My girlfriends are for a lifetime. And each one has the hugest place in my heart and my life. There is nothing I would not do for my friends. Thank you girls, you know who you are, I love you dearly.

“A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”  - William Shakespeare

“Do not set foot on the path of the wicked or
walk in the way of evil men. Avoid it, do not travel on it; turn
from it and go on your way.” Proverbs 4:14-15 NIV

Think BIG

Lately I've been volunteering at a local homeless shelter. I help to prepare and serve a meal to those less fortunate in our inner-city. These people have nothing. They live on the streets and don’t know where their next meal is coming from.  Having known this, when they look at me with so much hope behind their eyes I can't help but be put to shame when I remember whining about not having a balcony in my apartment. This experience gave me a lesson in perspective.

We're viewing the vastness of this world through such a limited view - our own eyes. We tend to lose PERSPECTIVE of the big picture quite easily throughout the drudgery of day-to-day life. The human perspective can be so limited and incomplete. We have a temporal perspective, not an eternal one. We don't live in light of ETERNITY; we don’t look at the big picture as much as we should.

Since we're viewing the world from such a limited perspective, the things that naturally happen in our lives can tend to make us feel like it's the end of the world. Our “world” falls apart when things don’t go the way we want them to. We blow things out of proportion, we over analyze small situations, we get filled with anxiety when things don’t happen the way we planned. I've found that it's best to first change your perspective on things before you allow yourself to feel defeated. When you get all worked up over something, ask yourself "Will this matter in 5 years? Does this have eternal consequences in my life" If it doesn’t - drop it.

Here’s a few perspective lessons I’ve picked up along the way:

- Nobody is going to alert the media when he/she dumps you, and the world doesn’t stop so you can grieve. In the big picture: he/she was only put in your life for a reason, they have now completed their task. You're ready for the next stage. Let them go.

- Don't be so upset about not getting the job or not making the team: In the big picture: this door was only kept closed so you will be available for a much better opportunity coming your way. Be excited.

- Stop beating yourself about that stupid thing you did in college/high school/in your past relationship. In the big picture: The people that will be in your life forever will not remember or care about it, and if they do, it's worth a good laugh if anything. It's over. So get over it.

- Stop the anxiety and sleepless nights over that thing that's not happening. God willing, you WILL get into that college/ get married/get pregnant; and it will happen in His perfect timing. Stop getting worked up about it because it doesn’t make the wait go by any faster. Might as well find peace in the meantime. In the big picture: this time in your life is insignificantly short compared to the length of time you have left to live in eternity. RELAX.

- Don't even waste your time discussing what he said/she said, who's cheating on who, what happened last Friday night, and what was said behind closed doors. In the big picture: it doesn't matter. “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honourable, and right, and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are worthy of praise.” (Philippians 4:8).

- Please stop comparing yourself and what you have to the girl next door, the couple that got married in Fiji, the Robinsons across the streets, the CEO that drives the Ferrari. In the big picture: You can’t take any of this stuff with you and the only legacy you'll leave is how much you loved.

 If you are reading this right now, you are incredibly blessed. You have been given eyes to see, you can read, you have access to a computer (or smartphone), you are likely reading this in the comfort of a home or office. You are blessed. You have been given the GIFT of life and the opportunity to make a difference. Think of the BIG picture, and use your time wisely. We don't have a lot of it. 

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."