MM#28--The Bear and The Travelers

Hello I’m David and welcome back to another MOJO Minute.

One of the most neglected aspects in American culture over the last 25 years is friendship.   

The art of building and maintaining friendships in our society is severely lacking.

This was only exacerbated in the last 18 months with the COVID pandemic of 2020.

In one recent study, most adults can only name one or two “very good friends”

Todays women are better at cultivating and keeping friends than todays men are.

Well geez, that is disappointing.  

Cmon men we need to step up, here.   *laugh*

____pause

But how important is friendship?

Well, we know it is one of the most enduring qualities of being a human being.

To find someone else with the same common aims and mutual interests usually begins a friendship but then an organic maturity and depth follows the closest of friends to the point where each person will sacrifice a great deal for their good friends.

They will sacrifice time.   

Sacrifice Money.

Some make sacrifice their reputations 

Even in some extreme cases and the will sacrifice even their lives for the sake of that deep enduring quality of friendship.

The great Christian writer, C.S. Lewis called friendship a form of love, the least biological form of love but one of the most important.

The American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1841, told us. “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

Certainly every parent since the dawn of time knows how crucial the choice of their children’s friends are.

Because, on a daily basis, parents are reminded of the old adage, “good friends bring you up, bad friends bring you down.”

Parents look to their children’s friends as a bell weather on which way their children are trending!

So friendship matters.

It matters a great deal!

We know, Good Friends stick together in adversity.

Good friends give more than they receive.

Good friends encourage each other to live better, to pursue higher goals, and will endure each other’s hardships willingly 

and good friends will look past their friends short-comings and faults not wanting to inhibit their freedom of person out of a greater love.   That love of friendship.

If needed good friends will remind and gently correct their friend in private wanting to appeal to their friends better angels.   

So in todays MOJO minute, lets remember “to have a friend, we need to be a friend” 

keeping ever mindful that friendship is an active thing—meaning--you have to work at it.  

So reach out to one of your friends and say, “hey, how are you doing?” Out of general concern for them and…their sake, not yours.

Good friends will appreciate your reaching out and will recicpate for the sake of the friendship.      

For we all know deep down, “it is in the giving that we receive.”

And lets close with one of the ancients best reminders of what constitutes a good friendship.

It comes to us from the 6th century B.C. And some of us learned it as a kid and others later in life.  

It is the Aesop fable of “the Bear and the Travelers” and how to recognize a fair-weather friend in our lives.

and more importantly and how we ought not to be one of those fair-weather friends.

So lets ask some questions, before we start, 

When misfortune happens to our friends, how do we respond?   

Are we a good friend to them?   Do we stand by them?  

Are we there to be a helping hand, 

a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on or an encourager when needed?

Do we treat them as we would want to be treated if we were in the same circumstances?

Just some questions to ponder....

And Here’s “the Bear and the Travelers”, 

“Two travelers were on the road together when a bear suddenly appeared on the scene 

before he observed them, one made for a tree on the side of the road and climbed up into the branches and hid there.

the other was not so nimble as his companion and as he could not escape he threw himself on the ground and pretended to be dead 

the bear came up and sniffed all around him but he kept perfectly still and held his breath for they say that a bear will not touch a dead body 

the bear took him for a corpse and went away 

when the coast was clear the traveler in the tree came down and asked the other what it was the bear had whispered to him when he put his mouth to his ear

the other replied, “he told me never again to travel with a friend who deserts you at the first sign of danger.”