How Do You Define Friendship?

As we get started out with the winter season which means that we are no longer hanging and playing at the park.  We are going to be taking a look at friendships and friends.  Tonight we are planning on getting a good grip on the meaning of the word.  Asking students to think about how they define friendship, and then asking them to think about how their friends think of friendship.  It would be wrong to think that everyone has the same definition and attaches the same meaning to the word. I will be sharing a story from my child hood which gives meaning to the fact that not everyone defines friendship the same.  "Growing up I had a super tight friendship.  We were always doing things together and in our high school years we played tennis each and every Saturday morning.  I think I beat him only twice.  Each week we would bet a cassette tape and each week I would lose a great album.  Despite my losing we always remained close friends.  The misunderstanding came our senior year of high school when I started dating an underclassmen.  Not that my dating was a problem, the problem occurred when she dumped me and started dating him.  We had different definitions about friendship, like guys don't let girls get in-between friendships.  He did not see it that way.  I spent half of my childhood years and almost all of my high school years running with this guy, and today we don't even know where the other lives...
We want to help our middle school friends have a proper view of friendships, and help them consider who they are friends with as they go through the rest of their school years.  Tonight we will be looking at Proverbs 18:24
A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. We hope to impress upon them that they need to pour into their friendships and make them count, and that they should know how they and their friends define friendship...

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