Giving to our Friends

Healthy friendships are those that involve a mutual giving and receiving. Friendships that are out of balance in either direction will typically end in frustration and disappointment. To avoid either of these relational scenarios we need to learn how to become people that generously give and humbly receive.

Learning to give generously in our friendships requires that we give solitude a place of priority in our lives. For we can only give generously to others what we have first humbly received from God. Without times of intimate fellowship with our Creator we inevitably try to get our relational needs met by other human beings. And the moment that happens, the balance between giving and receiving becomes lopsided in direction of our receiving. So we become takers. We become needy and greedy--clingy and stingy. We become dependent and exploitive parasites that try to suck life off those around us in a vain attempt to fulfill our own needs. Such behavior ends up pushing away those people that we have come to depend on most because they cannot support the weigh of our expectations. Nor were they created to.

We must learn, then, to depend on God to meet our deepest needs as human beings. True friendships will be characterized by a mutual giving and receiving where both parties are getting life from God so that when they come together they are overflowing with the life given to them. When we give solitude a place of a priority in our lives we allow God to generously overflow in life toward those around us. We become streams of living water (Jn. 7:37-38).