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

Being intentional with Joy

James 1: 2   “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”   Have you ever not been in a good mood? Have you ever felt like things are just not going your way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it shows that you are human. Problems occur and things happen that can make us upset, and that is an unfortunate reality we have to face in this world .   For me, one of my resolutions this year is to be more joyful. If I had to make a book about the year of 2024, the title of it would be “ A sequence of difficulties” . In my life, it seemed I was experiencing problem after problem and issue after issue. I couldn’t escape them. The bitter truth is that problems and issues are inevitable, but our attitude towards them isn’t .   At th at time, I was angry at God for allowing all those things to happen to me, but in retrospect I can be grateful to see the work God was doing inside of me, the resilience he was building, ...
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

Uniqueness through Comparison

Galatians 1: 10   “ Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I t rying to please people? If I were still trying to please people , I would not be a servant of Christ”   In a world where there is so many different o pinions o n how you should act or behave, we see certain people, certain lifestyles and try to emulate and copy the way they walk and talk. But when we compare ourselves to Jesus, we set ourselves a part from this world.   There is nothing wrong with wanting material things: we might see a particular car someone has and wa nt that, or wear particular clothes , but we have to ask a question: do we want these things as simply materialistic things? Or are we wanting these things to seek the approvals of oth ers. If in the act of wanting those things makes us feel in adequate , insecure and less of, then it becomes problematic. I believe there is a innate desire to want better, to live better. I believe that sense of hope was ...
Post a Comment
Read more