Who Do You Choose to Hang Around...

The other day I found myself driving behind a trash truck. Driving behind a trash truck is not a very pleasant place to be. Even with your windows up sometimes the smell is just horrible. Something I noticed was how many little pieces of trash and junk flew out of that truck. Nothing very big, just little stuff flitting around. Most of it just sort of hits and flies on, but every once in a while something sticks to the windshield.

You know, life can sometimes be like following that trash truck depending on the things we do or the people we choose to hang around. Little bits of trash are flying all around us. How we live and how we react determine if any of it sticks to us; if we are changed by it. And I don't mean in a good way. If you're hanging around people all the time who are constantly throwing trash around, some of it is going to start sticking to you. Before you know it, you get caught up in the trash and suddenly you become something or someone you didn't want to become.

It's important that we choose Godly people to hang around. It's important to choose people who don't get caught up in the trash. It's important to look at things with the proper perspective. Because even in the best of situations some people can only see bad. No one is perfect. We all have days when we are tired of a situation or tired of someone's attitude or any number of things. But it's our perspective that decides how we will handle the situation. We can choose to trash everything we don't like or we can choose to see the good in it. We can choose to hang around people who are always doom and gloom or we can choose to hang around people who are striving to be the best they can be and trying to live their life the way God would want them to live it.

On that note, I love hanging out with our small group. We are not perfect. We have our times of griping just like anyone else does. But we always seem to bring things back to God. We try to see the good in the situation. We let people get things off their chest and we come back to why we are there. We are always there for each other. We laugh, we cry, we listen, we pray. We laugh a lot... we laugh a whole lot!!

I could not have chosen a better small group. In fact I didn't choose this one. God chose it for me. He knew exactly where we needed to be. It's like our whole group is soulmates. We are all within the same age group, we like a lot of the same things; 3 couples in our group were high school sweethearts and all 5 couples anniversaries are within a couple of weeks of each other! Pretty weird! And 3 years ago none of us knew each other! God is amazing!!

I say all of that to say, be aware of who God puts in your life. God can surround you with amazing friends if you pay attention. Satan can also surround you with people to bring you down. So if you find yourself getting caught behind that trash truck and you notice you are starting to smell a little like the trash, step back and make sure the people you are surrounding yourself with are the people God has chosen for you.

Blessings!

Do not be misled: "Bad company corrupts good character."
1 Corinthians 15:33