Spiritual Growth – Page 210 – REACHING HURTING WOMEN MINISTRIES

friend: noun

1.a person attached to another by feelings of affection.

2.a person who gives assistance.
3.a person who is on good terms with another

Friends are special people, they are chosen; not in someone’s life by accident.
Friends don’t force themselves on you when you want to be alone. Friends keep promises.

Loneliness and lack of social supports are linked to an increased risk of disease and higher mortality rates. So it stands to reason that good friendships enhance an individual’s sense of happiness and overall well-being.

Enter Social Networking.

As of January 2011 and after only seven years in existence, Facebook has more than 600 million active users with the average user having 130 friends.

A conservative estimate shows there are over 4,000 active networks. There’s MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning, Flickr and the list goes on. Yet with all our social technology advances, Americans have been suffering a loss of close friendships since at least 1985; and today few have any real confidants.

Modern friendships have lost the importance and the meaning they once had.

Do you have hundreds of Facebook friends but still feel lonely?

Most of us love introducing our best friends to others. Let me share mine with you…

Growing up a sexual abuse victim, a promiscuous teen who grew up to become an abuser; I felt totally unworthy of God’s love. But the Bible tells us it is the goodness of God that calls us to repentance.

Of these three: the friendship of God, the personal touch of Christ and the conviction of the Holy Spirit; it is the friendship of God that has been most significant to my life. It was the most healing thing for me to discover, that no matter what I had done, God really did love me!

There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ~ John 15:13

The evidence that having a friend is good for our health more than applies here. But we need more than a Facebook friend to help us make it through our daily struggles. Whatever our problems are we can bring them to The Friend of Sinners. What better BFF to have than Jesus!

Do you feel unworthy of God’s love, unable to come to Him because of things you’ve done?

Please allow me to pray for you…

Father God, I want to pray for my friend reading this right now. Thank you that you’ve brought her to this place. I ask for the Holy Spirit to touch her heart, so that she can know without a doubt that Jesus is her Friend. Amen.

This summer I attended a women’s workshop to wrap up of the Christian Virtues class I took in the Spring.
For one of the exercises, we paired up with a partner to practice sharing and listening skills. The goal was for the sharer to communicate a problem to the listener, who would then reflect back the problem and if possible, help solve it. The partners then switched roles and repeated the exercise with a different scenario. Some scenarios were fictional, but my partner, Sue, and I chose to use situations taken from our lives.

The situation I chose to share was from a pivotal and extremely difficult time in the 1990’s. When it happened I never shared my personal pain with anyone. Instead, I hid my pain, allowing the enemy to pull me into a downward spiral that lasted more than a decade, nearly costing me my marriage and my family.

During the workshop sharing exercise, Sue heard my pain without judgement, then gently offered me guidance and God’s love. More than fifteen years after the fact, I learned a valuable lesson:

If I would have done this years ago, I could have saved myself and my family lots of heartache!

LISTENER and SHARER

Both are important roles we will play several times in our lives with various friends and family members.

How good are we at listening?
Most of us not good at all.

How good are we at sharing our feelings and pain?
Not much better.

How can we improve?
Practice.

God loves us and puts the right people in our lives at just the right time. The challenge is to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, so we can recognize the person who needs our listening ear or feel that gentle nudge when it’s time to share our own struggles.

By internalizing our pain to avoid embarrassment today, we may set ourselves up for future suffering.

We must be willing to share our pain, open up our vulnerabilities and risk bring judged in order to receive potential inner healing.

Don’t go thru your pain alone!

Look around. Reach out… God has given you a friend who will understand and walk with you.