You knew this was coming… Mike has been discussing in the past weeks about how to be a friend and how to look for good friends – but now the subject changed. Now Mike hits closer to home than we would care to discuss. Always in friendships there seems to be disagreements. We say something wrong or we take something that was said wrong. When we start getting closer in our friendship we tend to show our true selves and this causes disagreements to occur. In marriage – this is a given! How we deal with those confrontations will ultimately decide whether our friendship grows or dissolves.
Before we get too far into this week of discussions, I had to laugh quietly when Mike shared a passage from Proverbs 9:21(NIV) “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.” I also like how the Message translated this verse – “Better to live alone in a tumbledown shack than share a mansion with a nagging spouse”
What made me laugh was the fact this came from a “wise man” that ended up having “seven hundred royal wives and three hundred concubines—a thousand women in all!” (1 Kings 11:3) 
Mike started of using the disagreement between Paul and Barnabas. Later on this week I want to share a little more about their friendship from how it got started to the end– but as a kick off – Here is a couple of questions for you to answer either in the blog or to yourself –
We all have dealt with confrontations in our friendships – recall the last time this happened to you.
What was the confrontation about?
Was it because of one or more of the six actions/ attitudes that Mike shared with us?
How did you handle it or how did it end?
Check back later this week (Tuesday or Wednesday) for the “rest of the story” on the friendship of Paul and Barnabas.
