Nothing feels worse than being betrayed by someone you love or a dear friend. To trust someone and find out that you have been “used” is, what I would have said when I was young, “the pits.” Betrayal is rampant in every area, from politicians and preachers to friends. What are we supposed to do when we have been attacked or betrayed by a friend? The book of Job is the classic example.
When Job’s troubles came, the phrase, “Job’s comforters“, was born. These guys came along and raked him over the coals of accusation on every level. Even his wife told him to “curse God and die“. Job complains to God 16:20 My friends scorn me, my eyes pour out tears to God. Have you ever felt like “when it rains it pours”, everything happens at once, and then people want to blame you. It is easy to be bitter at a time like that, but remember that Jesus forgave Peter after he denied Him before the people in the courtyard, within His hearing and to His face!
As long as we carry un-forgiveness in our heart, it is like carrying around an arm full of dirty diapers and being surprised when someone says something about the bad smell, it shows.
When did Job get everything back? Job 42:10 After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before. Job prayed for his friends and God gave him everything he had lost and twice as much! Is it easy to do? Not really, but we have to keep on keeping on, keep on trying so that we are innocent.
Proverbs 18:24 A man who has friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. The friend you need is Jesus, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and grief’s to bear, What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.”
1 John 5: 14-15 Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
Jesus told us to “ask” and we would receive. I know that sometimes it feels like the sky is brass and everything bounces back and lands in our lap, but, as I said, there is a solution and there is a “friend that sticks closer than a brother” and that friend is Jesus, whatever you have need of, take it to Him, right now. Sometimes it is the act of “unloading” yourself to someone that you know cares and will keep your confidence that helps the most.
Pray that you are able to forgive those that have wronged you, the bonus of that is that you shall be forgiven…amen.
Harolene.com 
I will give you $100 to change that diaper.
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And here I do it free on a daily basis 🤣😂
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Love THE diapers all.
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Hold out for $1000!
Not sure about 3 men, here. My shrink is still counting, but I definitely have 3 babies!
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On a more serious note, I was thinking a few days ago about my best friend in high school. He reached out to me a month ago on an internet messenger connection that I never use. So his outreach languished there for a month before I noticed he had tried to catch me.
We don’t talk very often. Some years we talk barely
once. Some years we talk a dozen times and see each other twice. In 2009, I had been divorced for a while by that time and was spending a summer in northern New Mexico, and that gave me the chance to race up to Denver and see him probably 3 or 4 times that summer. His wife is a foreign lady who usually goes back to see her kin for lengthy summer visits, and so we were both bachelors, sorta, and we connected with a couple other old friends too.
Why am I telling all that?
Dunno
I once valued his friendship above all others. Even now, he is the oldest of my best friends. I can tell a boring story about how we met. It was an odd story, but not one that is really all THAT interesting. But I am mindful that he was a fly-on-the-wall kind of person when I met him. I kinda was too. I remember when several years later, Eric and Dylan shot up Columbine High School and the media floated the idea that these kids were part of an antisocial gang of thugs called Trench Coat Mafia.
Well, my buddy and me were two loners for a year or so, and we were not quite anti-social, but something close to it, and we didn’t wear trench coats, but like most cliques, we had a style.
I remember this one time when we got harassed BADLY by a group of kids at a high school football game. They threatened us and humiliated us in front of a whole crowd of people. One guy in that gang was a real Alpha Male type and came with ten or twenty of his buddies. Even the security guard saw the incident and turned away. We went home that night with our tails between our legs feeling very scorned.
I look at that now and I think of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid. But I also think about how disturbed we were by that event, and how dangerous that made us. We were very high strung after that.
Looking back, I see that violence in movies DID influence me. I couldn’t see it at the time, but we had watched Kurt Russell in Escape from New York and in that movie, there is a scene where Russell fights for his life using a baseball bat with spikes driven through it. A real gladiator type thing.
My buddy and I did not have guns, and no access that we were aware of. but we did have bats and sixteen penny nails. Soon we had weapons. Vicious weapons. And we carried them in the trunk of the car EVERYWHERE we went in case we met that gang of thugs again. We were going to even the score.
Just think about that a minute.
If we had actually swung those things at a kid and hit him in the face with it, we would have made Peter Jennings News, and you would know my name!
What I have not said, yet, is that there was a different gang of kids who one night upset my buddy by “touching” his car. It turned into a verbal thing for a few minutes and escalated quickly. He popped the trunk and as soon as that first bat came out, I grabbed the other. We chased those kids down the street. Fortunately they were fast! I can’t imagine now what I would have done if I had caught a kid. I like to think I would have just waved it around, but honestly, the situation was out of control. If I had caught someone and if they had struggled it away from me, then I could have been the one hurt!
Anyway, so me and this friend have these adventures in our past.
But our friendship, even though it was really thick a few times, actually was threatened by him a few times too. He was sortof an on again off again friend. I got my feelings hurt really bad at one point. I have since learned just to sit a bit loose with him over time. We are not as close as I would think, and that kinda stinks, but I am just rolling with it.
I met him when I was the new kid in town. He had been the new kid just a couple years before I showed up.
Turns out he had a buddy. I didn’t realize that when I came along, but he did. I thought the other guy was just sorta a kid from the hood, but no. And the way I found out? Well, sometimes all three of us would hang out together. Three is always a crowd, I surely don’t have to explain, but I never FELT like I was the odd one.
Hmmm… note to self… this is an indicator of things, and if I will be sensitive about them… I will see it next time
Well, so we were all walking along the sidewalk one day on our lunch hour and this other kid turns around and slugs me in the stomach! A sucker punch. I doubled over in pain and shock and he stood there laughing. My buddy scolded him for it, which I guess cued me not to punch back. So the other kid apologized, but still laughed about it. But he seemed real nervous the rest of the day, and so was I.
The other kid never hung out with us again.
I recall a year later, that my buddy got a new friend and I became the third wheel. I felt it, bad. I got ditched at parties and stuff. It took a while for the truth to sink in with me because I felt we had better friendship than that. A year after that, we patched up our friendship. Five years after that, he told me that the guy he ditched me to run off with had ditched him, and he knew what that felt like.
“Bromance” – they call it, I think. Not a romance at all, but it felt like a deep friendship and when betrayed, it felt bad.
All these years later, my buddy rarely calls me. Nine times out of ten, it is me who initiates. But he remembers and reminds me that when we were sixteen we promised to get a nursing home room together and “split a nurse.”
Anyway, he reached out to me recently and I failed to be there for him when he tried. That is an odd thing for us. To my knowledge that NEVER happens, but it did this time and I figured it out. So I called to check up on him.
During the conversation he revealed that the pandemic really has him scared.
Hmmm… I would not have guessed it.
Seems like he figured talking to me would be a comfort to him.
Hope it was.
That was 10 days ago … about.
I probably wont talk to him until next year now. His kids are grown. They will be in college next year. I haven’t seen them since they were in diapers.
I woke up a couple days ago and was laying ther just thinking about all this stuff, and then you post.
Aint that curious…
That’s my story… for now.
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I feel honored that you would share that with me. I know, I know, I can empathize … it hurts and thing is people that do that to you don’t even know because you cover it well. h
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