HOLLY FURTICK SERMON DEEPENING YOUR FRIENDSHIPS: Pastor Holly Furtick teaches us one of The foundations of Friendship, she said, so every year i force my family to get dressed up and take a picture for our Christmas card, I’m not going to lie, I go to great lengths to make sure that we coordinate but we aren’t too matchy and last year I was thinking about what I wanted to do for our Christmas picture and I decided that I wanted to get a picture with the skyline of charlotte in the background so our amazing photographer, her name is Cheyenne, she’s been taking our family’s picture for years, she said she knew just the place, she said it’s on the top of a parking garage just outside of charlotte right at the edge of uptown and she gave me the address. So the day came and it was unseasonably cold and windy, it was November and here in the south, it’s not usually cold and windy in November but we got dressed and we got to the top of the garage and when we stepped out of the elevator Cheyenne was there waiting for us with a ladder and she pointed to a ledge that was about four feet high and it was about one foot wide and she said okay, y’all carefully get up here and I looked at my husband and I was like I promise I did not know that we were going to have to stand up there, so don’t panic because we were actually in danger, the ledge it was like a partition on the top for the parking spaces, on the top of the parking garage.
so if we fell off the ledge we weren’t plunging to our desks, but we were probably in danger of breaking a limb, also i had on four inch heels which i could barely walk in you know sometimes we just suffer through things for a picture and i have to remind you that this was a family picture, so I was going to have to stand next to my children, I’m sure your children don’t do this, but my children turn into complete demons when we take a family picture, so i grabbed them by the arms some of them I might have held by the face and I immediately went into mom lecture mode and I said don’t lean on me, don’t pull on me, don’t even touch me and don’t even think about touching each other, Pastor Holly Furtick said, I’m happy to report that we stood on that ledge in the freezing wind and nobody felt and I’m also happy to report that Cheyenne captured the best family picture that has ever been taken of us.
Pastor Holly Furtick said, the reason I’m telling you this story is because one of the foundations of friendship is stability. We have to strive to be a source of strength for the people in our lives, not a drain. oak trees are something that you can lean on, they’re a refuge from the sun, they have deep roots that sustain them through a storm, orchids on the other hand, they have to be coddled, they need water but not too much water they need sunlight but not too much sunlight they need the perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold, its either you are an orchid or an oak tree. When it comes to your relationships, let’s just take a minute and be honest as women we all can have our dramatic moments, I’m standing here with all of you today and saying I have my dramatic moments but orchids are constantly in crisis or they’re always hurt by something. Someone said always offended by something someone did or didn’t do, orchids need constant coddling and this is exhausting for their friends.
Psalm 1 reminds us of who we are, it says blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers but whose delight is in the law of the lord and who meditates on his law day and night, that person is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither, whatever they do prospers and that is our goal, we want to be planted not perfect, just growing stable.