Wise Friendships

Friendships are beautiful experiences if friends are chosen carefully. Solomon wisely says (Proverbs 12:26) "A righteous man is cautious in friendship but the way of the wicked leads them astray."

Everyone needs at least one good friend. A true friend is usually a confident. One who may be trusted to listen but who will also keep a confidence. There is therapy in being able to discuss a matter with a friend, knowing that he will not rush to others with that which has been shared.

Often a friend's input into a situation changes ones whole perspective. Sometimes, just the fact that he or she listens intently is all a person needs to come to a sensible decision. A friend's perspective is invaluable in that he or she may reveal a side to your dilemma that you had not personally considered.

God did not create us to be 'loners.' Those who choose that path are usually people who have become embittered because of hurtful experiences from unwisely chosen friendships.

We've probably all been hurt by a friend or at least one we thought was our friend. Perhaps we shared some intimate detail about our life that we felt a need to talk about only to have that person show his true colors by spreading the information to others or making judgments that caused the friendship to dissolve. Many of us have learned by those bitter experiences to be careful in our choice of friends.

Friends that are ill chosen can lead people into sin. I think especially of young people who chose friends just to be one of the crowd. Teenagers seem to be the most vulnerable. Athletic skills, appearance, clothing, even the latest electronic gadget seem to separate teens into social classes. When there is a desire to 'belong' the teen often fails to observe the character traits of those with whom they desire to share affinity. All too often, they are so desperate for acceptance that they will do almost anything to belong.

Parents play a valuable role at this particular moment and walk a fine line. The wisest choice of approach is to always take one's concern to God in prayer asking for wisdom as to the best technique to use in discussing the matter with the teen. I, personally, always made it a habit to ask God to cause my children to bring up the subject that I desired to discuss with them. He never failed!

Friendships are best held lightly. They tend to come and go as we have 'need' for a certain relationship. It is only occasionally that a close, intimate, friendship will last a lifetime. When it happens, we can count ourselves fortunate. If it doesn't, we must be willing to move ahead knowing that we are better people for having had the experience whether it was negative or positive.

If you need a friend... be a friend.

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Friendship - The Best way of Life

Every family member. Every neighbor. Every coworker. Every stranger. Every person is a potential friend.

Isn't it strange how the word "friend" conjures closer ties than words like relative, sibling, or even spouse? Yet it is even a double blessing when one's friend happens to also be a husband, wife or family member.

Friend. One of the sweetest words in any language, whatever it is called in that language. Friend. A person with whom you are in harmony, one accord. Someone that understands you, someone that you understand. One you are in rapport with. A friend is a human being who has become more human to you than anyone else. To become a friend is to become a person in a greater sense, at a deeper level, than merely being another human.

Friendship. Why don't we define or describe friendship as a "ship" with just friends on board? A ship that carries no other cargo but friends. Really, in true friendship, the two of you do feel like you have climbed into some kind of vessel that floats above and beyond the ordinary. Friendship. A simple network of two persons who have discovered a special chemistry for a relationship in which each person says things and acts in ways that benefit the other. The epitome and glory of a life aglow with unselfishness. Life at its peak and very best is friendship.

Yet there is an irony to friendship: the benefits of the birth of friendship can match the blight of the death of friendship. Just as many lives have been transformed by the discovery of true friendship, so many lives have been torn down by the destruction of the same. Therefore, to ease or lighten the blow of friendship's demise, it really behooves us to understand friendship in its many complex aspects and facets. Though friendship itself is a very simple human relationship, there is not much that is simplistic about the ingredients and tenets that go into making a great friendship.

First, there are various types of friendship with reference to time or timing. Every genuine friendship is a timely relationship. As such, a friendship can be seasonal, temporary, or permanent.

1. Seasonal friendship is one that is on and off, based on the season in either friend's life. Seasonal friendship is only useful and rewarding when the season is right, or else, one person or both become a bother.
2. Temporary friendship comes to an end after it has served its purpose. Attempts to prolong a temporary friendship may create disrespect for a friend, resentment or even enmity towards an ex-friend. It is often better to let a temporary friendship die, or you may find yourself playing the undertaker, regretting why you revived the corpse in the first place. Friendship can never be a forced relationship; so, when it's over, let it go.
3. Permanent friendship is the yearning of everyone who values friendship. Yet a lifelong friend is a treasure too few and far between. After more than 40 years on Planet Earth, I can claim about 3 permanent friends so far, and one of them is my wife. The average person so desires each and every friendship to be lifelong that she tries to force the issue and keep a friendship on life support, when it would be far better to eulogize the thing and just let it go to the trash bin of human relationships. When you find a truly permanent friendship, the circumstances and dynamics of that relationship will serve to sustain it over the years. No need to repair a temp friend to make him or her perm.

Second, every friendship has a basis on which it sits and rests. It is important to know what a friendship is based on. Friendship can be based on affinity, personality, common bond, need or interest.

1. In an affinity-based friendship, two friends just take a natural liking or attraction to each other. They just seem to click. It's a chemistry thing. This form of friendship tends to lean towards romantic involvement, though it may develop between two people who may never drag romance into it. Affinity friends do not have to be alike. In fact, they may actually be opposites, but as we know from magnetic poles, opposites can and do attract.
2. In a personality-based friendship, two individuals become friends because they are similar; they may both be reserved (introvert), outgoing (extrovert), or mediocre (average) for that matter. Or politically, they may be conservative, liberal or moderate in their views. They may both be secular, progressive, religious or traditional.
3. Common-bond friendship is one between persons of a similar ethnicity (two Hispanics), religion (two Muslims), church (two Baptists), nationality (two Chinese), team (two Celtics fans) or life experience (two refugees). Yes, birds of like feather do flock together.
4. In a need-based friendship, two persons came together because one of them had a need that the other helped meet. For example, you become friends with the person who paid for your stay at a motel when you lost your job or when you just got of jail. Need-based friendship can be an uncomfortable union of unequals, unless something happens for the two friends to switch roles, whereby the one who had received help before becomes the helper in a situation that puts the original helper at a point of need. For example, the guy who paid his friend's motel bill gets evicted by his landlord and has to lodge with his friend who now owns an apartment. Because of the usually one-sided nature of need-based friendship, it is often not a simultaneously enjoyable experience for both friends. Therefore, this form of friendship is often short-lived, if the "needy" and the "savior" do not switch hats throughout the relationship.
5. Interest-based friendship is one in which two friends share a common interest, which may be sports, music, career path, books, movies, travel, etc. This form of friendship is likely to terminate if one person replaces the interest that formed the basis of the relationship. For example, if you and I became friends primarily because we were members of the same band, our friendship may bite the dust if our band disbands. Interest-based friendship runs the risk of being very superficial, though it can become deep and meaningful if the parties put in the effort needed to keep it interesting.

Third, every real friendship has a purpose. A friendship should be active and mutual in order to fulfill its purpose. Why do humans become friends? Let's itemize the manifold purpose of friendship for the two persons involved:

1. Mutual assistance: friends are to help each other; a relationship of enablement is an abuse of friendship.
2. Motivation: friends encourage each other; they edify or build up each other; they inspire each other to succeed and excel beyond mediocrity.
3. Improvement: friends make each other better; friends sharpen each other; King Solomon described it as iron sharpening iron; friends improve each other's personhood, self-esteem, confidence or performance as iron sharpens iron.
4. Advancement or Progress: friends help each other move from one point to the other
5. Maturity: friends nurture each other to grow up, become mature, a more complete person.
6. Endurance: friendship is a coping mechanism; a true friend gives you the edge in difficult times, because she will strengthen and empower you to cope with some of life's toughest challenges; friends see each other through hardship, without being mere bystanders. Friendship can make the difference between surviving war, as prisoner of war, or life in a refugee camp.

Friendship that fails to somehow in some way make one or both friends better cannot be called genuine friendship. It may be a leech-connection, a sponge-bond, or codependency, but not friendship in the true sense of the concept. Any friendship that ceases to make one better no longer has any purpose for being kept alive.When friendship ends, former friends often become disappointed, or worse. But this need not be case. You can experience a better closure to the death of friendship, so that a little piece of your life does not die with every deceased friendship of your past. For this to happen, you need to look at the "failure" or downfall of every friendship differently. As serious as the death of a friendship is, it can be a time to refresh and regroup, without taking yourself off the shelf or display at Friendship Mall. Think, speak and believe ideas along these lines:

1. Resentment rejected: I refuse to be bitter or resentful towards my ex-friend.
2. Regret unnecessary: Instead of regret the end to our friendship, I choose to savor all the good times we spent together and the good things that came from our friendship when it was alive and well. Do the same thing that bereaved people do at funerals; moan the loss but cherish and treasure the precious memories.
3. Gratitude: I am grateful and thankful that our paths crossed and our lives connected; somehow I believe this world is a better place, because we met and shared our lives.
4. Not Abandoned: Just because our friendship has ended does not mean my ex-friend betrayed or abandoned me. It doesn't mean he did not appreciate all I did for him, or what we meant to each other. There may be things going on in her life that I can't or don't understand for now.
5. Purpose served: Our friendship has served a purpose. Perhaps it was meant to be only a temporary friendship, which is no less valuable than a permanent friendship.
6. Potential Friend: For my part, I refuse to consider my one-time friend an enemy. My ex-friend remains a potential friend, but I will leave that to the twists and turns of life.
7. Better Me: In the mean time, I will work on myself, so that the next person who is fortunate to have me as friend will have one of the best friends they ever had. Yes, I'll remain friendly and keep the entrance to friendship a double door, ready to fling wide open again if life would have it so.

Being a great friend means that you understand the value of friendship. It also means that you are aware of the type of friendship you are in, the basis for your friendship, the purpose of friendship, and how to bring positive closure to a fallen friendship.

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How To Start A Successful Home Business?

Are you thinking about becoming a home business owner? Creating your own business is an excellent way to earn an income while being independent and spending more time with your family. Read the following article if you want to learn more about home businesses and how to create yours.

You should not launch your home business before doing a lot of research on your business idea and on the market you are interested in. If possible, talk to other business owners to get a better idea of how they market their products or services. Doing some research on the market you are interested in is essential because it will give you an idea of how your audience will react to your products or services. If you find that the market you are interested in is saturated, look for another business idea. You should also figure out a way to reach out to your audience. A lot of home business owners use the Internet to promote their products or services.

Develop a very detailed business plan. Your business plan can be used to convince investors to help you launch your business. You can also use your plan as a guideline to develop your business. A good business plan should clearly state the goal of your business and explain the strategies you will use to meet these goals. You should include your expectations in term of sales, a cost analysis to figure out how much your products or services will cost you and some reasonable profit expectations.

Find a way to finance your business. Working at home will help you save a lot of money but you will still have to invest in quality equipment and supplies to launch your business. If you cannot afford to purchase everything you need right away, get started with the strict minimum and invest more in your business as soon as you can. You should consider borrowing money to finance your business. Try borrowing from friends or relatives if you can. You can also apply for a business loan if you are confident that your profits will allow you to make your loan payments on time.

Register your business once you are ready to launch it. You should not start selling products or services until your business is properly registered. You can visit the website of the Small Business Administration to download all the forms you need and submit them online. Register your business name with the SBA and with state agencies. You will also have to apply for federal and state permits. You might need additional licenses if you are working with dangerous materials or with food. If you have a hard time with registering your business, find a lawyer who can help you.

These tips will help you get ready to launch your own business. Take the time to research your market and develop your business plan before launching your business. You will get better results if you work hard on the early stages of your business

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SEO Tips - What To Do, What Not To Do And Why

Try a little experiment. Go to Google, Bing, yahoo or any other search engine sometime and search for topics on internet marketing, website traffic or search rankings and invariably, you will see a whole bunch of ads, websites and articles on SEO. Search engine optimization has become the hot topic of the web-based marketing and advertising world.

There is a good reason for this. While SEO is not the end all be all of marketing your company online, it is the core foundation of driving organic traffic to your online real estate. There's no way around it.

The fact of the matter is, if it can be searched, it must be optimized. So in this article, we'll quickly review some things that you or your internet marketer should be doing to optimize your content, a few things you should not do, and why.

What you should do to improve your SEO, traffic and rankings

This article is hardly the right forum to go into depth on every SEO topic and method, so we're going to move through these pretty fast. What you should get out of this is a place to start, some things to ask your SEO specialist about, or some topics for further research. But these are the core things that will be the foundation of all your optimization efforts.

DO create relevant titles that contain your most vital keywords. These are the first things searched and often appear as the link in organic search results. Keep them to within the required lengths as prescribed by whatever search method is used, i.e. search engine, on-site search etc.

DO create descriptions, either for uploaded content or in the Meta description for your site pages that is both specifically descriptive to the page's content and also keyword rich for the searches. These will often become the description of the link. Again, adhere to size requirements.

DO create content that is relevant and search friendly. This means liberally using your keywords in such a way that it's not only keyword rich but also reader friendly. This can be tricky and often where a professional SEO writer comes in very handy.

DO use header tags, such as h1, h2 up to h6 These are picked up by the searches and used to organize content and help the crawlers.

DO actively build quality and relevant back links to your web content. This is a major factor in search rankings. The best links are from sites that relate to you and are already ranked high. It's a bit like the old saying, "Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are."

DO use the alt attribute in your image tags. This is a great place to place keywords and is also friendly for accessibility. You don't want img tags on your sites that do not have an alt label.

DO use the title attribute for links. This is like the alt tag for images. It not only helps the search crawlers but also helps people navigating because the title and alt attributes become tooltips.

What not to do in your SEO efforts

Now let's quickly go over a list of things that you should avoid. Things that either don't work, or can actually be used against you. While you definitely want search engines to notice you, you don't want them to label you as a "villain" in the cyber world. This can hurt your website's performance.

DON'T stuff alt or title tags with a whole bunch of keywords to try and achieve keyword density. This is a punishable offense. Make sure that these attributes describe the link or image.

DON'T over-stuff your content with keywords. Just like the links and images, you don't want to make it seem that you're just trying to spam the page with keywords. Not only does this not help, the new search algorithms actually penalize you for it. The most important thing about content is that it is helpful to the reader.

DON'T go crazy with your Meta keywords tag. This is not used much anymore. It's good to have one, but keep it to 8 or fewer keywords.

DON'T use Flash for navigation if you want a high rank. It's okay to use flash as a page element, but remember, Flash files can't be read by the search engines, so you don't want to use them as navigation or textual content elements. There is certainly a place for Flash, but not so much in SEO.

DON'T use underscores "_" in your links. A good SEO link should be like this: services-provided.html.

Why are these DO's and DON'T's important?

While the lists above are brief, they do give you some indication of how to proceed with your SEO. There is certainly much more that can be said, but let's examine what we've done so far.

The main reason to optimize everything you publish online is because you want organic searches to find you. You'll definitely want to actively promote yourself using other internet marketing efforts, but you do want your stuff to be working for you as well.

As you may have noticed above, there was a lot of mention about creating titles, descriptions and content for the reader. You see, the thing that search engines do, and what they strive to do well, is provide quality answers to their users' questions. And the best answer is one that can be read and easily understood. So you're better off creating user friendly text content than writing a bunch of keyword-rich gibberish. This does not help, and is not rewarded. You have to strike a balance between pleasing Google and attracting the attention of your visitor and getting them to become a customer.

Remember that the optimization part of SEO is the most important thing. You want to optimize everything you publish. Your websites, your articles, your blogs, your videos, your links, your posts and your social media interactions. Optimize so that these things give you the best results. That means from searches and from the consumers of the content.

Yes, it's a very complex area. So many people have a hard time with SEO, or optimization in the broad view. There is help out there for you, be it articles like this, eBooks, books, or professionals who know how to write, film, program and consult for the best possible results. But never forget how important SEO is to your long-term success.

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