My dad taught me a lot about friendships, though the education was mainly non-verbal. I grew up in a small town, and dad would often stop by the firehall to check in with his buddies. They'd all grab a Coke, eat some peanuts, and catch up for 30 minutes or so. No agenda. Just hanging with the fellas. He'd let me tag along many times. For a five year old boy, being given free reign to explore a fire truck was the highlight of my week, maybe even my month.
I learned from dad that relationships matter, but like everything else in life, they don't come free. A person who wants to keep friends must invest time in them. In today's society, time is the most valuable commodity we have, and yet we rarely have time for people. I honestly do believe that the pace at which we now live life is out of control. We have PDAs, emails, faxes, and high speed internet to keep us constantly accessible for communication, yet we rarely have time to actually spend time with people if its not business related. Worse yet, how about we actually do carve out time for lunch with someone and they spend 42 minutes of the hour answering 17 different phone calls, basically sending you the message that every person who calls me is more important than you.
Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." It's hard to express love outside of time. It's hard to show a brother that you love him when all you can do is send a text message to stay in touch. People matter more than business, because people are the business the matters most.
www.bethemanministries.com
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