Greater Love!

If you were in pain, which friend (or friends) would you want by your side? Why?

Which friend would you definitely not want around when you’re in pain? Why?

I thought this is so important and talks about the importance of having someone whom we can trust upon and count upon. We live in a world where every other thing we do confines and falls under a business transactions bracket, which includes our relationships too. We want ROI (Return of investment) for all that we do. There is always a selfish hidden unsaid agenda that keeps running in our minds.

Shiv Khera in his book “You can win” states that there are these two types of friendship.

1.    Friendship of pleasure 2. Friendship of convenience.

In Friendship of Pleasure we choose friends who can engage with us for fun, having a good time together, sometimes regularly or sometimes at fixed intervals. Again, this is conditioned on how each person is willing to spend the money. But when we notice the other persons spending capacity is going bad we don’t want to keep him/her close anymore.

The second type, ‘Friendship of convenience’ is conditioned to these three factors, ‘Proximity’: We want friends who are convenient to socialize, even for that matter our helping them in time of crisis is sometimes affected by proximity. And then the second category is ‘Usefulness’. We do not want to lose friends who are resourceful and well-connected. As long as we are benefited, we have a great attitude about them but the moment same friends are not much useful we don’t want them anymore. We have all the demands and we want our friends to comply and still keep helping us in spite of all our changing moods. Sadly, this applies to majority. Basically, selfishness and self-centeredness rule our heart. The third category is ‘Common enemy’. We come to know a particular friend, though you don’t like him/her but the same person does not like the person you don't like, we tend to patch up and become friends.

How true it is, isn’t it? The Bible always talks about the message of love. Love your God with all heart and love others as yourself. And it defines friend by these words, ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friend’. Jesus demonstrated his love and expects that we demonstrate too for each other and spread love and harmony to build a remarkable community.

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