I had a great time this weekend at the launch of the International Christian Center (ICC) launch of their brand new 15 acre Imara campus. Having just been through our own launch a little while back, I was well placed to appreciate the remarkable work that had gone into setting up. It was an action & emotion packed service and judging from the over 4000 who showed up + ICC’s great history of involvement in their community, I predict the Villa/Imara area will never be the same again. Kudos to our sister-church ICC and to my good friend Pst. Philip Kitoto on a job well done.
And speaking of friends, I read this quote recently…
"Real friends are those who, when you feel you've made a fool of yourself, don't feel you've done a permanent job"
I spoke with one of my friends this week on several guys we know whose marriages have hit a wall. These are people who have loved and served God and had what seemed to be great marriages. And yet after many years together, their wives suddenly (at least to us) left them and moved on to other pursuits. The sad thing for each of these couples is that no one was close enough to them to see it coming.
In the career-building phase of life that so many of us are in, it’s so easy to focus on work at the expense of relationships. And to slowly find that we end up with no real friends. People who can ask us difficult questions. Who can challenge our decisions, not to hold us back but because they have our back.
It sometimes feels like work at this stage to build friends; much easier to be surrounded by colleagues, acquaintances and admirers, aka ‘mafans’. And yet Carol & I are learning that we need to slow down enough to make time for our friends. Because if and when the going gets tough, we’ll be glad we did.
5 comments:
"Real friends are those who, when you feel you've made a fool of yourself, don't feel you've done a permanent job" ..... that's a new one and it has really made me laugh. Just this last week I thought long and hard about friends - i stumbled on the sermons on the mavuno website and listened to the series on friends and it was a real reminder on how friends are important and yet most of the time we are too busy for them or too busy to be one.... you are certainly right - we all need to slow down and make time for what is important.
Hey Alice, I loved those sermons too. Pretty insightful. Here's to swimming upstream against modern culture!
This brings to mind the quote by a journalist Walter Winchell that says "A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.". Pastor M your message comes to me at the right time as i am currently in SE Asia on a 2 months assignment, which is in pursuit of a building a career. Its time to slow down...
Great to hear Maurice! God's grace & wisdom as you make the transition.
and i am taking parenting class and i was struck at the birth of James Dobson's "Focus on the Family". I need to be a friend to all those friends that have been there through some really tough times and I pray that we never get too busy to have time for a cup of coffee with friends,if just for ol'tym's sakes. Thanks Pastor M. Maurice, way to go...and yes, here's to swimming upstream against modern (and secular) culture!!
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