Dear Friends,

Jesus said, You are my friends, if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Those words of Jesus are pretty clear. He calls us friends. You don't call someone a friend if you  are going to hold them off at arms length and not get close to them.  When we look at the Father's relationship with His son, and the relationship of the Holy Spirit with both of them we see that our God is about relationships. Reconciling us to Him through His son's work.

This relationship extends to our relationship with each other as part of a body of believers. As much as we live in a world that thrives on independence, the more we are reminded that our lives also thrive on good healthy relationships.

Someone recently said to me that "there is no place to connect with people today."  What if the church is still relevant because is it a place where people can come and find people that will care about them? But it is more than being friendly and welcoming. It is stepping out of our comfort zone and actually doing what it takes to establish friendships with new people.  May God bless us in this year to become better friends with those we have known a long time and those our Lord brings into our lives for the first time.