L3: Plug In

A Friend Indeed

7:20:00 AM

(From Plug In 06/08/2017)

Good evening everyone! I hope all of you are having a great time! It’s so good to come back again this month and see all of you!

Happy Friendship day!

I was looking online for the history or the origin for this day but there’s no specific origin as such. Some say that Hallmark cards put up a day like that initially and there were many who criticized it because they thought the company was doing it just to promote their cards.

‘Friends’; how many of us can say that we have friends?

I remember this one friend of mine, he was so panicky! We all have those kinds right? They are worried about everything and anything! It was in midst of our exams and we had just finished one and getting ready to write the next one. SO we are all sitting in the canteen and going through the final things to revise (in my case, learning for the first time too!) and then all of a sudden he starts about or not if he would pass yesterday’s exam. I told him, “ Yeah you will don’t worry about it.” “Yes, but still, I don’t know if I will pass.” Was his reply and I kept reminding him and trying to encourage him that he would pass. He was so worried that he wouldn’t stop. Finally he asked me again after a few minutes (I think for the tenth time or something) “Do you really think I will pass?” I look at him, pause for a while and then with all seriousness told him, “No, man I think you won’t make it. You are going to fail.” I mean what else could I do, I was so irritated and he wasn’t letting me study. He kept quiet after that! Long story short: he failed that paper!

Friends! We can love them and hate them at the same time!

I have seen that there are different categories of friends. I have them in my life and then I am sure all of us have friends in these different categories and you’ll understand them as I go through them:

1: Surface Friendships:

It’s just on a surface level friendship. I think you all know what I mean. There’s nothing more than just hi or a bye. You know these people but they are just your hi and bye friends. You meet them in your college; you meet them here if you’ve been coming here regularly. You know some of their names, you know what they are studying for, and you might even know where they live. But they remain at the surface and go no more than a simple hi or a bye. “Hi, how are you doing?” “Great to see you, we should meet up sometime.” What really messes these people up is when you ask them when? And then they’d be like, “What when? No, bye.” Indirectly they are telling you; let’s just keep it this way. We like it like this. In other words they don’t really mean it when they say we should catch up sometime. I am sure as I’m speaking some faces are coming into your minds right now.

2: Structured Friendships:

These are friendships that we encounter continually. WE meet them at college every day. We meet them at work every day. We get together simply because there’s a reason that we are there in the same place at the same time. We are not together because of each other but because of the function that we are there. It’s structured. We do things together but nothing more than that.

3: Solid and Secure Friendships:

This is taking friendships to a whole new level. IT’s not surface level and neither is it structured. It’s built on commitment and based on unconditional love. It’s not on a convenience level but it’s based on deep commitment to each other that no matter what we will get it going. These are the kind of friends that will stick it out for you. They are close to you. They know you inside out and even though they know your good things, they also know your bad side and still want to stick with you.

This is the type of friendships that I want to focus on today. We call them close friends sometimes. These are the types of friends that we constantly want to be with. Sometimes we get so close that we call them ‘best friends’.

Now, let me ask all of us this question, how many of us can say that we have a best friend?

You see, I find it surprising because my generation did not go by without having a best friend. You ask anyone of the older generation; it is very rarely that someone would say that they did not have a best friend. There was a survey that was taken to find out among people to see how many of them had a best friend and the survey results that were posted said that 1 out of every 5 people did not have a best friend.

The survey also went on to state that ever since the advent of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc people prefer to remain lonely and glued to their social media than ever before. What’s interesting though what I’ve found is that people want to have more friends on these social websites!

There are people who are ready to be friends on Facebook or Instagram so that they can get more likes for their posts! I think I would like to categorize them as the Social Media Friendships. Think about this: every time you post a picture on Facebook or Instagram, do you login back just a few seconds later to find out how many likes you got on it? Every time you post a status update on Whatsapp, don’t you look to see how many people have viewed it? The more the better you feel don’t you? It’s ironical because you want friends at the same time you don’t want friends that are close to you!

The truth is that every one of us has friends who fall into any one of those categories that I just mentioned; it’s just that we haven’t allowed many of them to get close to us. I’ve known so many people today who don’t get close to people and neither do they allow people to get close to them because of one word: Trust.

Too many people have broken trust today with people because of what they said or what they did that caused hurt and pain in the process. SO they are close to no one today so that people can’t hurt them anymore.

Here’s what I’ve found about not getting close to people. The good news is that they can’t hurt you; the bad news is that they can’t help you either. Living life, rarely does a day go by without needing to take help from other people.

How can being close to someone be helpful? They say that the wealthiest man that ever lived in this world was King Solomon. They say that not only was he the wealthiest but also the wisest man who ever lived. He wrote a book called Proverbs and there are 4 things he mentions about close friendships about why they are important and how helpful close friends can be:

1: Few friends are true friends

Proverbs 18:24, “Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family.”

What does that mean? These close friends are the ones who will stick with you. When we go through a crisis, they are the ones who are always going to be there with you. Someone once said that your real friends are the ones who will be with you when you are going through difficult times in your life.

2: Friends will speak the truth to you

Proverbs 27:6, “The wounds from a friend are worth it; kisses from an enemy do you in.”

Honestly, we don’t like it do we? We don’t like our friends who come and tell us the truth. But we all know that even if we don’t like it, that is what will keep us guarded and on the right track. Let me tell you this: my best friend is my wife Anu. Man, can she speak the truth! Every time I do a talk, there might be many others who come up and say that it was great and all that but when I come home, I get it straight from my wife who tells me exactly what was good and what was not. Why do I need to hear that? Because that’s what helps me to get better!

3: Friends refresh us

Proverbs 27:9, “….a sweet friendship refreshes the soul.”

Isn’t that true? When we are worn out and tired and discouraged, who else but close friends who can refresh us during those times?

Let me ask this question now. How many of us want to have a best friend? How many of us would like friends like this: a friend that refreshes us, speaks the truth to us? We all want them don’t we?

But here’s the thing. It’s not about how much we want in a person as much as who we are as a person. In other words, the people around us will only be as good as close as we really are.

Many young people come to me all the time asking questions about marriage and all. They come and tell me that they have these lists and about how they are praying for the right partner. I smile right through all of it and at the end of it all I ask a simple question. You have quite a good list there, but let me ask you this question: Do you have all those qualities that you have mentioned in your list? Or if the guy or girl you are praying for, if they have a list, do you think you would fit or match up to all the qualities on their list? Often times, they stare at me surprised. It would seem like they just went to another planet when they heard that!

So when we say that we want a best friend, here’s my take: Do you have it in you to be a best friend to someone? How do you become a good friend?

1: Being the right person

It doesn’t start with the other people. It starts with me. I am not going to wait for the other person to change; I am going to see that I will. There was a marriage conference once where a renowned speaker was talking to the couples with his wife. Towards the end of the marriage conference, they opened up for Q&A and one of the ladies in the conference asked the wife of the speaker, “Does he (that is her husband pointing to the speaker) make you happy?” There was utter silence till the wife replied, “No, he does not.” There was utter surprise all over the hall. Even the speaker was looking totally surprised at his wife’s reply. Then she said, “I realized that in the first six months of my marriage that he would never make me happy. He was always doing this or that and I would get upset. It came to a point till I realized that he could never make me happy. It’s not that he wouldn’t but it’s just that he couldn’t. The only person who could make me happy was myself. The moment I realized that then my husband has added immeasurably to my happiness.” The speaker was so relieved!

What was the wife saying? You’ve to be the right person. In other words, you’ve to take the initiative to be the right one. It doesn’t start with fixing the other person; you’ve to start with yourself. Too often we wait for others to come around us and start, what would happen if we would make that start? What if I could add to someone else’s life, what if I could make someone’s life a little better?

2: Committing Time and Energy:

IT’s going to take time and we are going to have to set aside that time.

This coming December, me and Anu will be celebrating our tenth marriage anniversary. I heard this before getting married and I decided I would do what I knew to commit to that. Someone said that marriages are like a garden, if it should continue to have fresh flowers, then we must continue to tend it and water it.

Every year, I make it a point, to surprise her either on her birthday or on our anniversary. I have done some crazy stuff and some simple things but make sure do it to make it memorable. She says I never surprise her but I think I do.

Being close friends does not come in a day. It takes us to sacrifice our time and requires us to put energy or effort into making sure it blooms up over time.

3: It requires us to trust them:

I know this is probably the most difficult but this is what it takes to build a strong foundation. Someone said that trust is the foundation of all friendships. Trust is the glue that holds two people together.

If you’ve ever had friends at all, then you know what I am about to say is true. It doesn’t take long for someone to break their trust with us. A very long time ago, I had gone into a complete shell. I didn’t trust anyone. Every person I had trusted had broken it. So I didn’t want to go into that process of getting hurt again.

I read this statement off a book and I made it my life definition of trust. To me trusting people means allowing them to fail you. Trusting people means allowing them to fail you.

No one is perfect and when we realize that and we are still willing to take that initiative knowing that they might as well fail us one day gives us a better chance to trust them. They will fail us anyway, so I might as well trust them rather than risk living my life all alone.

I later realized that there was someone who did this first. He did it before me and therefore I can do it too. His name is Jesus.

Jesus took an initiative to connect and get close to us. This is what He said

John 15:13-15, “13 There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. 15 I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn't confide in his slaves. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me.”

No matter how many times we’ve failed, He’s still willing to trust us. He’s still willing to give us great things even though he knows that we are weak and that we can easily fail Him.

2 Corinthians 4:7, “We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure.”

We are fragile clay jars that can break easily. Yet He was willing to pour out Himself, His treasure into weak jars like us that can break.

Think about this: If we have lakhs or crores of money, wouldn’t we want to keep it in a place where it’s safe, a place that won’t break?

That’s how we look at people isn’t it? When we share our deepest secrets with them, we expect them not to break. But Jesus was ready to trust us because He trusted God His Father.

One thing I’ve learnt over the years is that it becomes easier to trust people knowing that we can trust in Jesus because even if people fail me, which will surely happen, I can trust Him who can never fail me. It doesn’t mean that I stop trusting people, because as much as I need Jesus, I need them as well.

Today as I close, Jesus is calling us His friends. Would we be willing to call Him our friend as well? When we can call Him friend and place our trust in Him, it becomes easier for us to trust the people He has placed around us.

Perspective

It's all about perspective!

8:08:00 AM

(From Plug In 02/07/17)

Good evening everyone! Today unlike other Plug In meetings, we thought of having something different. We are going to have a small little activity after which I will be giving a summary towards the end of it all.

So as you all are seated in groups, each of you will be handed a blank sheet of paper and a pen. We want you to write what you think about this one word that we are going to put up on the screen. You could write anything about the word. There’s no right or wrong to it. Just write down what you think about the word. We will give you 3 minutes to do so.

Here’s the word: RELATIONSHIPS

Your time starts now.

Now that you have written what you think, here’s what we are going to do. We want you to discuss within your teams about the things that you’ve written down and at the end of 5 minutes, we want you to summarize the whole thing and we want your team leader to come forward and speak about what you’ve discussed in regard to the same topic.

So what did you guys think about it?

I am kind of hoping that all of you learnt and were reminded of a few things you already knew about relationships today!

Now, what I am going to do is not give another summary to all of what was already spoken. But what I want to do for the next 10 minutes or so is to draw your attention to something else that all of you were working on right throughout this whole activity! It’s another word and that is what I want to talk about. The word is ‘perspective’

When each of you was asked to write about relationships, each of you wrote based on your own perspective about what you thought about relationships. When you were discussing with each other you got to learn about each other’s perspective on the same topic and when we had the leaders come up and share here you got a wider perspective on the same topic. You see, as we kept expanding the perspective about the same topic, we got to learn a lot more than what we already knew about this one topic. You see it’s all about one’s perspective!

How many of you can see two women in this picture?

You see, there are two women in one picture. It's all about perspective!

Let me share this story with you that I read recently.

Once there was a young couple who moved into a new neighborhood; The next morning, while they were having breakfast, the young woman noticed her neighbor hanging the washed clothes in her backyard, through her window. “That laundry is not very clean”, she said to her husband, “She doesn’t even know how to wash clothes properly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap”. To this, her husband looked out the window, but remained silent and continued with his breakfast.

This went on to become repetitive and every time her neighbor stepped out to hang her clothes out, this young woman made similar complaints about the clothes and sighed that she needed better detergent or put in more effort. About a month later, one day, this woman was surprised to see a nice clean line of clothes wrung out to dry in her neighbor’s backyard.

Looking at that, she exclaimed to her husband saying: “Look! She has finally learned how to wash properly. I wonder who taught her this.” Her husband replied back saying, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows! You see, it wasn’t the clothes that were dirty all along, but rather our own windows!!” leaving his wife embarrassed and at loss of words…

There’s just one thing that I want to emphasize on today and that is: Your success in any area of your life is dependent on your perspective.

From just the activity today, we already learnt this much about perspective. You can have your own perspective. But our perspective can give only so much rather a limited idea on anything or situation. I am not saying that our individual perspective has to be wrong but I will say that our individual perspective can be incomplete. Like for instance the picture of the women. Some of us could see just one woman.

But it changes when we have a collective perspective. When we have a collective perspective that is when we learn to listen to what others think about the same thing or situation, our perspective increases rather we begin to see things a little more differently. So there are two types of perspective in this world, one is our own and one is a collective that is a group perspective. Now we know that the group is wider than our own.

There’s this fact that I’ve learnt about one’s perspective. Our perspective is based on our past experiences.

Think about why some of you wrote about relationships the way you did. Didn’t some of you write it based on your past experiences good or bad? What you wrote about relationships was based on what you had experienced before. Now, that can be flawed or incomplete without having to listen to others. A collective perspective changed or rather added on to our individual perspective.

There’s a story in the bible that illustrates this so well. We all know the story of Moses. Whether you are a Christian or not today, the movies have captured in part a bit about Moses’ life on how he was a prince of Egypt and how he led the people of Israel out of Egypt and parted the waters of the Red Sea. Here’s the thing to that story: God told Moses to bring the people out of Egypt because He told them that HE was taking them into the Promised Land, a land where they would be free, a land where there was enough and more for them in fact it was called a land that was overflowing with milk and honey.

So they had been walking in the desert for 40 years and it was when they were somewhere in the outskirts of Canaan that was the Promised Land that God tells Moses

Numbers 13:1-2, “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 "Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the children of Israel;

Numbers 13:17-20, “17 When Moses sent them off to scout out Canaan, he said, "Go up through the Negev and then into the hill country. 18 Look the land over, see what it is like. Assess the people: Are they strong or weak? Are there few or many? 19 Observe the land: Is it pleasant or harsh? Describe the towns where they live: Are they open camps or fortified with walls? 20 And the soil: Is it fertile or barren? Are there forests? And try to bring back a sample of the produce that grows there — this is the season for the first ripe grapes."

The only thing that Moses and even God asked the spies to do was to see and to look at the land that God was giving to them. So they go and they brought back the report and this is what it says:

Numbers 13:25-28, “25 After forty days of scouting out the land, they returned home. 26 They presented themselves before Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation of the People of Israel in the Wilderness of Paran at Kadesh. They reported to the whole congregation and showed them the fruit of the land. 27 Then they told the story of their trip: "We went to the land to which you sent us and, oh! It does flow with milk and honey! Just look at this fruit! 28 The only thing is that the people who live there are fierce, their cities are huge and well fortified. Worse yet, we saw descendants of the giant Anak.

Numbers 13:30-33, “30 Caleb interrupted, called for silence before Moses and said, "Let's go up and take the land — now. We can do it." 31 But the others said, "We can't attack those people; they're way stronger than we are." 32 They spread scary rumors among the People of Israel. They said, "We scouted out the land from one end to the other — it's a land that swallows people whole. Everybody we saw was huge. 33 Why, we even saw the Nephilim giants (the Anak giants come from the Nephilim). Alongside them we felt like grasshoppers. And they looked down on us as if we were grasshoppers."

Amongst the twelve that went up there, ten of the spies had just one opinion, they saw that everything was good but when they saw the giants that were there in the land, according to their perspective or rather based on what they saw, they felt that they couldn’t overcome and take possession of the land. Let me ask the question why. Do you know why they had such a perspective? It was because of the way they saw themselves. Here’s another fact about perspective:

Our perspective is based on the way we see ourselves.

The ten spies here saw themselves as weak and they compared themselves to the giants saying that they were like grasshoppers in their enemy’s eyes. I wonder why grasshoppers! But many times the way we see different situations and different matters is largely reflective of the way we see ourselves.

Joshua and Caleb had a different perspective of the whole situation. They felt that they could take possession.

You see having your own perspective is one thing. But if having a collective perspective is better then there is a third perspective that I want to focus in on. Why did Joshua and Caleb have a different perspective? Why was it important? We saw one person’s own perspective. We saw what a difference a collective perspective could make and now we see what’s called as a God perspective!

Numbers 14:6-9, “6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, members of the scouting party, ripped their clothes 7 and addressed the assembled People of Israel: "The land we walked through and scouted out is a very good land — very good indeed. 8 If God is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land that flows, as they say, with milk and honey. And he'll give it to us. 9 Just don't rebel against God! And don't be afraid of those people. Why, we'll have them for lunch! They have no protection and God is on our side. Don't be afraid of them!"

Probably the most important perspective that we should always pay attention is to what God perspective on any has given situation or matter. Because that is the total complete perspective and that is what will truly bring success in our lives.

The people of Israel eventually did cross over into the Promised Land but those who did not believe ever made it. They never saw the Promised Land because of the wrong perspective!

I want to close with this thought today. Maybe you are a Christian and maybe you are not but I know this to be true that your success in any area of your life is dependent on your perspective about it. It’s important not to be limited to your own because it is never complete! We need a larger perspective which is why it is important to talk to others who know about the area much better than we do and most importantly what I would say brings true success is when we decide to look at it from God’s perspective because again sometimes like in this story, even a collective perspective can be wrong and not bring success.

If you want to come into a relationship with this God so that you can have His perspective then it’s important to believe in His Son Jesus Christ whom He sent so that we can have a relationship with Him. When we have a relationship with Him through His Son Jesus Christ then we can begin to have the God perspective as well.

L3

A Friend Indeed

It's all about perspective!

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