Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Choose Friends
Choose Friends
Remember, friendship runs in two ways. Too often, we evaluate a friendship based on the way it benefits
us. But lasting friendships are formed when we can cause those benefits to flow toward someone else.
So here is a question for you, what benefits do you bring to your friendships? We seem so quick to
categorize others, so quick to determine people’s worth based on what they can do for us, what they
drive or wear, or what their occupation is. Choose your friends for the sake of friendship – their
friendship to you, and more importantly, your friendship to them. Here are 3 things to teach kids about
choosing friends.
Choose your friends based on their values, not their status in society. Within our extended family, I had a
number of uncles who worked very different jobs. One was a high-ranking member of law enforcement,
another was an autoworker, and another was a baker. It never occurred to me that these positions might
carry value; to me, each of them was my uncle –they all loved me and looked out for me, and I cared for
them all. Their value, for me and others who knew them, was not determined by their job titles but by
the men they were twenty-four hours a day, whether working at their jobs, or hanging out at home, or
doing something else in their communities.
Choose friends who will stand by and guide you when you need it. Friends who put your interests before
their own. Number one on my list of those friends is my bride of more years than she might care to
remember – Lauren. Hers has been a voice of encouragement, love, character, and godly wisdom for well
beyond the years of our marriage. In fact, that is one of the things that attracted me to her. Her voice has
always carried messages of importance, pointing me toward what is right and what is in my best interest.
Those messages have shaped my character amid the lure and glamour of a world that is constantly trying
to make me detour from the path that God has set before me. (Just like you, your wife needs to be
careful in choosing her friends as well.)