How can I attract healthy friends and build healthy friendships?

June 06, 2014: How can I attract healthy friends and build healthy friendships? Pleaase "Share" this new Precious Prodigal post: http://bit.ly/1lb1D9g

Proverbs 18:24  “A man [that hath] friends must shew himself friendly”

I’ve been writing about friends and friendships for several days, and I hope it has challenged you to look at your own expectations rather than be disappointed in your friends. I suppose it could be that your friends are uncaring, insensitive, selfish, and cruel. However, if that’s actually the case, are they really your friends? My guess is your friends, like mine, are just people who are doing the best they can with what they have at any given time.

Unhealthy friends and friendships, on the other hand, can be your downfall. When I ask my students in Alabama’s Court Referral Program what they need to change in order to stay out of trouble, the first thing on their list is often “my friends.” And they sometimes say they have already separated themselves from those friends. That’s a good decision because you either are or are fast becoming what your friends are.

However, we’re social creatures…we need other people. To eliminate all our friends without replacing them with new and healthier friends is to set ourselves up for failure. So how do we go about making good friends? Proverbs 18:24 tells us a very basic truth: in order to have friends, we need to be a friend.

When I’m fishing, the fish I attract is going to be a direct result of the bait I use. So if I keep attracting the “wrong” kind of friends, I might want to take a look at that. If it happens over and over again, there’s only one common factor. Guess what that is.

So how do we make good friends and cultivate healthy friendships? The first thing we can do is take a look at the kind of friend we are. When my kids were young, one of my daughters began to share with me how disappointed she was in her sisters and brothers. I listened to her for a minute and finally asked her what kind of sister she was to her siblings. She thought for a minute and said, “Probably not the best” and then continued her litany of complaints about the others.

When I asked her again what kind of sister she was, she burst out with, “I don’t want to talk about that! I want to talk about how bad they are!” While that may have been amusing from a child, it isn’t nearly that amusing from those of us who are supposed to be adults. The bottom line is that the best way to attract healthy friends is to be a healthy person and a healthy friend ourselves.

I love the Prayer of St. Francis, which says in part, “…grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.” It puts the responsibility for having a quality friendship right where it belongs…with us. It’s “casting our bread upon the waters,” (Eccl 11:1) and that kind of friend is going to attract the right kind of friends.

Challenge for today: Can you, just for today, begin to work on yourself so you can be the right kind of friend?