Th Heart of a Child

Lesson 4 (I think)

My daughter came home to share that some girls at school are just plain mean and she doesn't understand why. The story went something like this:

Three girls are best friends, usually two of them at a time. The third one is always left out. The third one or odd-girl-out changes each week. Well it appears the two girls "Jane and Kate" have excluded "Molly" forever. Very sad story, but I am sure not a new one to any of us.

My daughter, Jessie, came home with a broken heart for "Molly". She wondered why she would pick friends that were mean to her and didn't treat her with love.

I said to her, sometimes people just don't know there is a different kind of friendship. No one taught "Molly" her true worth or maybe no one ever showed her what a true friend looks like. Or maybe this situation is about how we will handle someone else's pain when we see it. God really wants to know what followers of Christ would do? He askes us to be different than the rest.

(To understand the full story would be to know that "Molly" has never been nice to Jessie. But Jessie is so grounded and confident, she picks friends who treat her well all the time.)

So I left her with this lesson and allowed her to process on her own. I am sure we will talk again tomorrow about the outcome.

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and every one who loves is born of God and knows God.......By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son in to the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."
1 John 4:7-11