Wednesdays Friend
Good Morning Friends,
Wednesday has arrived to greet you. I hope the day finds you well rested and ready to give it your best. Though we cannot change how life goes or how people treat us; we can make a Positive Difference each day through our attitudes, actions and gestures towards those in our live everyday, the following quotes say it best. Have a great day and don’t let the negative people in your head to turn it upside down. Make it what YOU want it to be!
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
Phillips Brooks
There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.
John Andrew Holmes
The Making of a Friend
Author: Byron Pulsifer
What does it take to make a friend? A normal question with not so normal answers in some cases.
One of these situations of not the usual answer happened to me luckily not that long ago.
As some would suspect from my background, I am not the most open person at times because of the kind of work I did many years ago - that work was in the justice system where one does not necessarily develop a natural affinity to make friendships with everyone.
Paint Everyone with the Same Brush?
But, one thing that should never be compromised is the ability to give everyone a fair hearing without prejudice or malice. In other words, do not paint everyone with the same brush because of past circumstances.
I had occasion to be a vendor at a local market and during a lull in customers, I took a walk around the rest of the craft show. I came across another vendor who was displaying similar products and stopped in to preview his work.
As soon as I walked in his area, he came over and started to chat. As he began to tell me about his work, I sensed that there was more to his casual discussion than first appeared.
Sure, he was friendly and quite knowledgeable about his craft but there was more to him than what first was presented.
Just As I Suspected
I began to ask him about what he did before he became an artisan and learned what I had suspected. He had been a .
. . . . drug addict and had served time in prison.
Now, years ago, I would have simply thanked him for his time and left. But, as time would have it, and as I was not given to make prejudicial judgments, I remained to listen to his story.
And, what had been a happenstance meeting turned out to be an open dialogue where we both shared our backgrounds.
He had made a complete reversal in his life. He had made a decision to become a better person, clean from drugs and turned his life around partly by focusing his energy on his craft.
And, to make his life even more challenging, he had suffered a severe industrial accident that left him with one eye, a crushed esophagus that meant he could not eat solid foods ever again.
We must have chatted about our differing backgrounds and experiences for well over an hour, and this conversation continued off and on for several weeks whenever I happened to be in town.
The long and short is that we are very good friends to this day appreciating each others background and being openly accepting of what made our lives different and unique.
Makings of a Friend
The making of a friend, for me, means being accepting of others, not to prejudge, to give each person an opportunity to express whom they are without jumping down their throat, or assuming that they are unworthy of my time.
Each of us is unique and we all are different. We are neither better nor worse; we are just different. Friendship will not happen unless you are willing to.
Wednesday’s Questions…….????????
Questions?
If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn?
If you take a Oriental person and spin him around several times,
does he become disoriented?
Is it OK to use the AM radio after noon?
What do chickens think we taste like?
What do people in China call their good plates?
What do you call a male ladybug?
What hair color do they put on the driver's license of a bald
man?
When dog food is new and improved tasting, who tests it?
When they first invented the clock, how did they know what time
it was to set it to?
Which is the other side of the street?
Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes?
Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?
Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
Why don't they call mustaches "mouthbrows?"