How can one person be a friend to secularists, other professed followers of Jesus, and Muslims? Is the ambition impossible? In liaison with God, nothing, absolutely nothing is impossible. If the supreme ambition is to become like God, if that ambition is socialized, and if it is altruistic, then it can be fulfilled, because God is our friend.
When I group together secularists, Christians, and Muslims in my mind, I am thinking of friends in Europe, where the level of stress has increased dramatically. Facing the difficulties in the society, what can one person do? Unite with others. Divide the work into manageable components. Cooperate with wise leadership. And become Jesus’ many-sided gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
Everyone, man or woman, religious or not, reflecting honestly from the true self, wants to love and be loved, to have friends and be a friend. In many countries, to be friends involves commitment and loyalty far beyond what passes for friendship with many people in the United States.
Most of all, everyone needs the friendship of God. Loneliness can invade this human life. Even in the midst of social activity, loneliness may cast its shadow. If we could only see the countless things that God is continually doing for us, sense the love that continuously blesses in wisdom and perfection from within! But that awareness dawns only gradually, punctuated by tastes (“Taste and see that the Lord is goodness”). As we gradually grow toward continuous communion, most of the time, our assurance is not a matter of God-consciousness but of faith.
Faith is nourished like an embryo. Gradually, parental love and the rhythm of growth enable us to enter life and grow up to mature adulthood, ever more competent in managing the difficult challenges of life in our world today.
Friendship involves faith, and friendship is reciprocated. God has faith in us, and we can reciprocate that faith. What kind of friend receives a touch from the great Friend of all and plunges back into activity without taking time to stand in the fullness of person-to-Person friendship?
The friendship with which God relates to us motivates every true impulse of friendship in the creature. When divine friendship motivates our contact with persons, be they secular, Christian, Muslim, or whatever, then the cosmic leverage will be there as we help this lost world find its way.
The Friend
A friendly touch from out-of-sight,
A simple gift, a big delight.
Remember now to rise and turn
To thank and live and stand and burn
in flames of friendship deep and true.
While cosmic thoughts soar forth in hues
of sky and stars and heav’nly home
that reaches down to welcome lone-
ly pilgrims, here find calm
to rest and live your daily psalm
as friends of God, who deep within
strengthens all who live in him.
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http://www.hindustantimes.com/Images/2014/10/9357c8ea-e963-4e85-9361-c157e1c423a9Wallpaper2.JPG
God is the great friend of all. No greater friendship exists beyond or above God. But how can we extend this awareness that God is the greatest friend that we can have? Since the great God lives within all of his children, this awareness is only a desire away.
Looking to my own experience with the great Friend, I did not consider him to be a friend, because I did not know him personally and what I had been taught about him contained so much error in my understanding of his relationship with me.
It took quite sometime before I came to know him as a true reality and a great friend. When I finally realized that this great friend was going through all of the experiences with me and as me, that he was leading me through them rather than around them. I finally realized that he was assisting in my growth and spiritual development. I realized that this was the height of friendship and love-to grow from incompleteness to completeness, to be perfect even as he is perfect, despite my sometime negative emotions towards the experiences.
The comprehension of God as a true reality and a friend is an individual journey. But we can assist with this journey by revealing to each other this great friend’s boundless love and friendship.
Dr. Perry