Skip to main content

God’s help through friendships

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labour: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up” 

My relationship with my ‘friends’ has never truly been the best. Friends are quoted because I don’t think there ever truly were my friends, only people I was around enough to let time pass by. There are people in our lives that should only be there for a season, but for me, it seemed like I kept people that should have left, only because of fear of loneliness and because of comfort. We are called to love everyone, but we also are called to surround ourselves with people that bring us up, not bring us down.  

Recently my mental health hasn’t been the best. Being in a state of sadness, my natural response is to isolate myself. When I do isolate myself, I isolate completely, even from God. Over the years, I’ve realised that through my isolation and my lack of communication to God, He still speaks to me. He tells me “You're not alone in this” and “it will get better”, maybe not verbally, but through the friends that I have. Friendships are God’s communication of saying that this life is not meant to be lived alone.  

Looking more closely at the verse, we are shown a dual relationship is better than a singular one. It tells us that this dual relationship is “a good return for their labour”. You’re probably assuming that this can only be interpreted from an agricultural perspective, but I think much more can be read through this. “Labour” can be synonymous for work, and work can be related to life. The lives that we live are hard work: on a day-to-day basis, there will be things that make things difficult and may make us want to give up, however our friends are there to help us in those times. 

God calls for community and collaboration because it’s an extension of His character. We see it throughout scripture because God wants us to know the value of it. The trinity is the first relationship we see at work in The Bible. During creation, there is a collective terminology that we see: “let us”, which means there is more than one person at work. If we see that God is invested in community, why can’t we embody the same thing? 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Choosing Love

1 John 4:19   “We love because H e first loved us”   Whenever I’m in a bad mood... let’s just say I’m not the nicest person to be around. I’m the type of person that can’t hide how I’m feeling. I rarely smile when something is wrong, I probably walk a little different and most likely I have my head dangling down moping. In this state, I’m probably a short fuse: if someone probably looks at me wrong, I may get angry.   I don’t say all of this to applaud myself, but rather to show what not to do. In this world , it is very easy to not have a good day: whether it’s a person that irritated us, maybe a particular circumstance that you’re in, or ma ybe it’s even yourself. All of this, regardless of the situation forces us to have a choice: a choice of how we decide to treat people.   Love is always spoken about from a feeling-based concept, and though you can feel love for someone, very often we mis s the times when it is not easy. The reason why the...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Omnipresent God

Hebrews 13:8   “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”   Usually with these blogs I tend to write quite broadly: trying to speak and relate to pretty much everyone . However, today I w anted to speak to a particular type of person: a person who has trust issues. I’m not talking about having trust issues with people, alt hough it would be very normal if this was the case, I’m talking about having trust issues with God.   When I say trust issues with God, I’m not saying you reject his character or existence, but rather you are rejecting his nature of being Omnipresent. When we see this word being used it’s usually from a geographical perspective but very rarely is it talked about from a time perspective.   Let me tell you a quick story about how God convicted me this week, and what influenced this blog today. I was walking back home physically, but in my mind, I was working overtime: stressing about my finances and budgeting. During that time...
Post a Comment
Read more

Identity built through Christ

John 1:12    “ Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed his name, he gave the right to become children of God”   Identity is always something I have struggled with. I believed that if I did not act a certain way with certain people I would not be accepted. I built my identity on the perception of others: letting other people's opinion of me dictate my value as a person. One thing I didn’t realise was that my value had already been written , something established long before I was even born. My value: your value, is built through Jesus. And so, we can’t let the opinion of others affect us, whether positive or negative because our identity is not built on the perception of others but of God. We are all seen di fferently by different people , maybe your someone’s brother or sister, a mum or a dad, or something else. The most common association t o our identity is our names. It’s what our friends , teachers and family refer to us by: an associat...
Post a Comment
Read more