A few key traits of a real friend include honesty, openness, loyalty, the ability to listen, and I have been newly convinced the ability to give a good hug is important too.  You have to start by actually caring about the other person, being willing to listen when they have something they need to talk about, be able to comfort and support them through words and actions, and you have to be willing to be honest, even in areas that might not reflect so well on you.  You also have to be willing to open up to others.  You can be everything that a person could ask for, but if you don't ever need that person, then you are not fulfilling their need to help you!  It amazes me how many people who would otherwise make great friends refuse to open up and instead bottle things up inside and try to deal with everything by themselves.  And while it's a good thing to try not to always run to someone when any little thing goes wrong, but to be a good friend, you also have to let someone else be a good friend by helping you!

I've been blessed recently with a few new friends, and there's not much of a better feeling than getting to hang out with someone who you know is a real friend, not someone who is only gonna hang out with you when you're the cool flavor or whatever, but someone who will stick by you when things aren't so fun, when others abandon you, when it's not the most convenient for them.  I'm really grateful for my friends - I don't know what I would do without them, and I hope I'm as good a friend to them as I can be.
*hugs*

I'm not an amazing guy.  My parents, I'm sure, would tell you differently.  But really, I'm not that great a person.  I'm kinda average in most things, fairly athletic, kinda smart, and I have some less than desireable tendencies.  I am, in fact, a human, and a guy at that.  So I do sometimes make an inappropriate joke, be it on purponse or by accident, and I don't have a very clean past.  I admit it - I did a lot of things when I was a little younger that would make my parents puke, and I'm not really proud of it.  But I'll tell ya what, I'm honest about it all.

A lot has gone on recently that has helped me see just how ridiculous "Christians" can be.  Early this semester, I made a few new friends.  Not too many...you all know that I'm not really the social butterfly type.  But what friends I do have really matter alot to me.  So I was kinda close with a couple people - we would hang out a lot, talk quite a bit, and we got along well.  It was great.  But then something happened and almost simultaneously all of these people stopped talking to me and started blowing me off like crazy.  Someone apparently started some rumors about me.  I don't know what any of the rumors were/are because nobody will tell me anything about it.  I don't know who started this mess because nobody who knows will tell me.  All I know is that someone has started a chain of gossip, and the people that I counted friends apparently fell into the gossip pit.  Nobody even bothered to ask me if any of the rumors were true.  I kinda thought that a friend would come say "hey...I heard this...is this true?"  But nobody bothered...and that's pretty painful.

This ridiculous mess has continued day after day with me trying to find out who is saying stuff so that I can talk to them and find out why they would do this.  Doesn't Mattew 18 say that if we have a problem with someone we're supposed to go talk to them about it and try to get them to change?  Because apparently people at PHC seem to think that Matthew 18 reads something more along the lines of "If you have a problem with someone, start some vicious rumors and let the gossip gang pass them around until it destroys the person's reputation and costs the person his friends and dignity...but at all costs remain anonymous."

I guess I say all this out of frustration.  You all know that I don't have a whole lot of real friends, and I'm not suggesting I'm not to blame for that.  But it's awful painful when you care about a friendship and it gets destroyed by sinful gossip.  And then it becomes incredibly hard to make any other friends because everybody already knows about what an awful person I am.  I guess if anyone reads this who is involved in this silly mess I say this to you - come talk to me.  I am not a mean guy and I am willing to forgive.  If I did something that offended you and started this whole mess, I'd like to know what I did so that I can make it right and not do it again.  If you have heard stuff about me, come talk to me and ask me about it.  The only secret I have is my middle name; I'll be honest with you about my past or my present, things I said or did, and what I meant.  The word "Christian" is literally translated "Christ-like," and if Jesus heard a rumor, I think he would give the accused man a chance to hear and respond to the charges against him before he made a judgment...whether the issue is as grave as a murder or as small as whether the accused is worthy of your friendship.

Proverbs 16:28 - A perverse man stirs up dissension, and gossip separates close friends.