"Do People Care About You, or What You Can Do for Them?"
Hello amazing #indiaunited friends, I trust you are doing great. Welcome to my blog.
This question is a reminder that we need to be able to differentiate being valued from being used as a tool to achieve aims. I say this because most times people tend to value those immediate assistance during a turbulent time in their lives more than those who stood with them through thick and thin, building and depositing genuine love for them to navigate daily struggles.
One day, some people came with law enforcement agents to arrest one of our neighbours, claiming the man owed and had refused to pay the debt. When they started struggling to arrest him, the people around asked him to contact his friends and family to raise some funds instead of resisting arrest. He reached out to his friend, and he came to his aid, but without any reasonable funds, claiming he does not have such idle funds to borrow him.
Meanwhile, this friend has been his support system for as long as we've known the man.
As fate would have it, he called another man who happened to be his townsman, and he borrowed from him the amount he needed to secure his freedom from the law enforcement agents. Immediately, they let he changed it for his friend and told him to stop coming to his house since he could not assist him.
We were all surprised by how he treated the man because the man had been a strong family friend of theirs, providing support and even travelling with them when they were bereaved. The man, though in agony, told him he least expected that money could come in between their friendship, considering all the help he had rendered to him.
Team Work
It was clear that our neighbour never valued his friend; rather, he was using him to achieve his goals, which was wrong. I also learnt from what happened that day that a genuine relationship is not built on what one could offer alone but on character, empathy, compassion, genuine feelings and pure love.
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First picture generated using ChatGPT