Being Friendly (Re-post)

I've been thinking a lot lately about being friendly. Not just acting friendly, but being tender on the inside and genuinely caring about other people and their needs. Proverbs 18:24 says "A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly.." People who show themselves friendly have a lot of friends! This world has become hard and inconsiderate of the feelings of other people. Someone could be laying hurt on a road side and hundreds of cars may go by before someone even stops to help. A kid might be sitting on the curb crying ,and many walk by, un-moved. People treat certain types of people differently. They may be friendly or respectful to someone who is well dressed or professional, but they ignore people of "lower class." What happened to loving people? God is no respecter of persons. We shouldn't be either. God loves everybody. Poor people, disabled people, smelly people, drug addicts, homeless people, ALL people. We need to show them the love of God by sharing it with them. A way we can start is by being friendly. The reason a lot of people end up the way they do is because of a bad child hood. So many people have grown up without love in a home. They don't care how they look or smell anymore because nobody has loved them and they don't even love themselves. I want to have a tender heart that says "if not for the grace of God, there goes me." People just need someone to love them and to be a friend to them. I challenge you to find someone who doesn't get much love or attention and befriend that person. You never know what it could do for them. There are a lot of lonely and miserable people in the world considering suicide. You being a friend could open a door of witness, and they can be filled with the Holy Ghost and experience true love -- the love of Jesus. It reaches for every heart. And that person who may have seemed good for nothing to the world, Jesus is willing to use for Him! Every soul is precious to God! It's so amazing how God can transform a life. And that all can start with us being sensitive to the feelings of human beings, even if the world isn't. We are the church and we should never be hard and inconsiderate like the world. We should be full of the tender love of God and spread it to as many as we can before He comes. Be friendly!