How to Deal with Bad Ending Friendships

Today's post comes to you from a girl in my eGroup.  Her name is Katelyn.  She is thirteen years old, volunteers in eKidz and attends Elevation - Rock Hill.  Katelyn makes time for God each day.  She passionate about telling others about Christ's love.  After many conversations with Katelyn through "Followers of God: Hunger Games", I fell in love with everything that came out of her mouth.  She is wise beyond her years, and I couldn't miss out on sharing her words with you! 

How to Deal with Bad Ending Friendships

Most childhood friendships come and go but sometimes they end very badly.  I used to be really close to this girl, but then she changed a lot and so did I.  I’m not blaming it all on her because we both changed.  I started hanging out with other friends and so did she.  Let’s just say the end of the relationship was bad because it ended over something really stupid and then it led to her doing more bad things to me and my other friends.  After that I had a hard time deciding what kind of friend she could be. I didn’t know if I could ever get really close to her again.

Then during the week Mark Driscoll preached in the How to Hug a Vampire series at Elevation Church, he talked about forgiveness.  There was a wake- up call.  I don’t have to be mad at her forever.  I can forgive her even though our future would never look like our past did.  It made me more confident to confront her sense I knew how to approach the situation.

We are going to be in the same class for the next few years and we can't avoid each other forever so I felt like I needed to forgive her. A couple weeks later I forgave her and it felt like a big weight was lifted off my shoulders. It feels so great now to not have a grudge between us. Even though our future friendship will not look like our past friendship, it feels great to forgive her.

Then at eGroup we talked about how we should respect other people and how God loves the sinner but hates the sin. That helped me a lot and made me think about her a lot. Even though our friendship will never be the same I still need to respect her. I need to do as God does. I will love the sinner, but hate the sins that she did against me and to me.

Luke 6:31 says “Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them”. I don’t want her to never forgive me or never respect me so that’s why I still need to be nice to her and respect her.

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I am so proud of Katelyn.  She is thirteen and realizes the need to forgive someone, even if they will never be friends again.  Katelyn was able to do something that most adults do not do.