Who You Hang With Makes a Difference

What draws you to your friends?

What draws your friends to you?

The heart of friendship

What is a friend?

It’s a simple question that can have lots of different answers. For one person, a friend might be someone with whom you share your innermost secrets. For another, it might be the with whom you chat on Facebook. However, you define friendship remember the first letter the “F” is that a friend is Faithful.

As young people, the one thing we all long for is to be Accepted and Loved. In order to feel fulfilled we dress to impress, dance to be noticed, spend hours in front of the mirror, we allow music, friends and clothing labels to define us. We forget that through various performances we are also defined by our actions, loud mouths or vulgar language we use. For example, the clothing we wear also defines us. You wearing a “Bad Girl/Bad Boy T-shirt” you actually cursing yourself, because every time someone sees it they saying “Bad Girl/Bad Boy” without you realizing it.

We do all these things yet that unfulfilled feeling still remains.

The sad thing is today the image of ourselves comes from the images, others have of us. A professor once said: - “I am not who you think I am, I am not who I think I am, I am who I think you think I am.”

Due to this and wanting to be accepted and loved we become blinded by worldly things like money, clothing, romance, alcohol, drugs. Etc. for we are like dancers, dance for attention and dance for an applause but still we have an empty happiness.

We need to realize that temptation will always be around. We are to put aside the things of this world and have steps of Humility, Obedience, Forgiveness and Love.

Questions to think about

· Who are your friends?

· Do most of them fit into a particular clique or category?

· Do you hang out with people from lots of different groups?

· What makes them fun to be with? What do you like to do when you’re together?

· Do you think your friends influence what you like or how you behave?

· Do you think you influence them? Are there some people who you think might be a bad influence on you?

· What qualities make for a good friend? Do they need to be fun? Trustworthy? Reliable? Someone you can talk to when times get rough? What’s the most important personality trait a friend should have?

· Think about your best friend. What makes them such a good friend? What do you like about them? What do they like about you? How would life be different without them?