JAFA 2
The key to understanding friendships and accessing their blessings is often hidden in the treatment of the friends involved. How you treat the friends in a friendship will determine how the friendships become toward you. It will determine what you reap from the friendship.
To therefore access the hidden treasures of any friendship is not to focus on treating the friendship right, but to focus on treating the friends in the friendship right. It is the friends who make up the friendship, not the friendship making up the friends.
Without friends there will be no friendship. Friendships die in the absence of friends. Your reactions to friends will determine the reactions of friendships toward you. Friendships change proportionate to the changes in the friends. The life of friendship is hidden in the friends.
Friendships don't change; it's the friends that change. When the friends change it affects the friendships for them to also change. Whenever you see changes in your friendships always remember that your friend in that friendship has changed.
The reason for the changes in your friend is a direct reflection of the treatment he or she has received, either from you or from a different source which may include his or her own personal changes. Aside the numerous factors that cause changes in friends, your treatment of them is a basic determinant of the major changes that occur in their lives and responses you receive from them.
Your treatment of friends is like a seed you plant in them; it produces for you whatever you put in them. When something affects your friend so much and causes him to change, but you decide to treat him differently from what affects him, your friend will change not to the direction of what happens to him but how you treat him. Your friendship with your friend will as a result not be a product of what happened to your friend, but a product of how you treated him.
If your friend is always sad but you make him happy, you will end up with a happy friendship and not a sad friendship. If your friend is unlovable but you make him lovable, you end up with a lovable friendship and not an unlovable friendship. Friends become what we plant in them. Friendships become how we treat our friends.
Determine to treat your friends rightly. The Apostle Paul says, "As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith." - Galatians 6:10. Increase your value and regard for people, because how you treat your friends decides what you receive from God.
(To get copies of my books on friendship, thus, "Who is your friend?" and "Every friend requires a different treatment", kindly contact me )
Kind regards.
John Arthur,
President / Founder,
The School of Friendship,
Central Region, Ghana.
+233 (0) 246 666 491