The Gift.

found this beautiful picture on the internet…

Do you sometimes feel that people use you? You seem to give and give to a particular person, friend or family member, but when you need something that person is never there for you? They never check in on you. How about when you are in a conversation and it is dominated by their issues and ‘you’ never come up; even though you have issues too? You are often a good ‘go-to’ person, but it is never reciprocated. You are there to help, to lend, to listen, to cheer up, or just there, but it feels one sided.

Many of us become frustrated, irritated and resentful in these scenarios. Friendships fall off and relationships often become strained. People feel used, abused, misused and plain old taken for granted. This topic has been in my spirit for a little over two months now and I have been dragging to write on it. As I was mulling it over weeks ago, I came across an analogy that the late Dr. Myles Munroe used.

He was giving a seminar and he said that he had to learn and understand that the reason people came was to partake of the gift he had to offer. He likened it to an apple tree. The gift of the apple tree is the apple itself. People go to the tree to pick and eat apples. They don’t care whether the tree will bear more apples or not. They don’t care about the leaves, the limbs, the roots or anything else about the tree. The tree on the other hand is not discriminating who gets apples nor is it worried about keeping apples for itself (eating its own fruit); it serves its gift: apples.

There are those who take from us what we serve. Things like advice, counsel, companionship, loyalty, unconditional love, knowledge and a plethora of things. It is a mistake for us to believe that we will also receive, from them, what we gave them. Many times that comes from an entirely different source. Just like God sends the rain and the sun to nourish the apple tree. And perhaps a gardener prunes the branches and takes care of the other areas of the tree, so He does for us. God replenishes us and there are those whom we ‘get’ from. We must quickly identify who these people are in our lives. And more times than not, we don’t ‘give’ to them. It is such a beautiful interdependent circle, and in my opinion it keeps us humble to be able to serve others with our gifts; because someone in turn serves us. People pick apples off of my tree and I pick mangoes off of someone else’s 🙂 (I love mangoes!)

Anyway don’t let me ramble.

A few years ago a friend ditched me when I needed her. I was so hurt, because if I am nothing else, I strive to be a loyal friend. God told me that I put her in the wrong bucket and she couldn’t give me what I needed in a friend. That hurt because I truly loved her and wanted her to be my friend; the kind that I was to her. Many of us find ourselves in this situation or similar ones. Our frustrations might be justified, but that person might not be capable of giving us what we need. Can we accept that?

These are my thoughts on this cold Wednesday 🙂

I encourage you not to be weary in doing well to others… (Galatians 6:9).

Serve others what you have been blessed to serve, we each are relying on the other’s gift.

Blessings

JC

Advertisement

 

The Simon and Peter in us!

Hi Everyone,

This week I was given the honor of being a guest blogger for the lovely Marlene over at Journey of Joy.

I’d love for you to hop over and check out my post The Simon and Peter in us!, which talks about pursuing our purpose and staying on course in the face of life’s many failures.

While you’re there check out some of Marlene’s stuff too, especially her Anthem, which truly blessed me from day one 😉

You will be blessed!

Blessings always 😉

JC

 

Friends……..Part 1

my ride or die 🙂

We have these Advanced Bible Study sessions at my church on the second Tuesday of every month and I love being there because it is fun to study and then sit down with my brothers and sisters and share what we come up with on different topics. Our topic tonight was Friends/Friendships. This is a topic that is dear to me and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and some of the points we came up with.

A friend is a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations. Someone said a friend is someone (other than family) that they love above normal. Someone else said a friend is someone they love just as if they were family. For most of us we throw the word around loosely and we have no real criteria to figure out who gets that special place in our lives. For some of us friendships are conditional and we only give what we hope to get back.

I personally believe in friendships; they require loyalty and investment. I think that a friendship is guided by love. And love is two things to me: unconditional and selfless. For friendships to thrive, the love has to be mutual. There are a few things that are critically important to friendships: