05.02.10 The 8th Consequence of Participating in Negative Gossip
8. Attraction of Fake Friends
My mind goes back to the time when a highly distinguished and well-established woman invited me for a cup of tea and how I met some of her friends. However, before long, one of them started ridiculing people's husbands who did not have first degrees; even mentioning some by name. Then, she insisted that such husbands should be kept in the shadows until they were educated enough to attend functions with their wives; to avoid the wives being embarrassed before the ‘learned’. And of course, all that was being accessorized with this and that rumour. The more I listened, the more I knew that I was in the wrong place. And, you guessed it. That was the last time I ever went back to my supposedly ‘new friend’s home. The point is, had I participated in that person’s gossip against people’s husbands, those women would have suspected that I would backbite them too; which would have made our budding friendship superficial since no discerning individual would be ready to put her emotions there for me to abuse by treading all over them with my gossip.
I discovered early that while negative gossip attracts ingenuine friends, it can cheat you off those who will genuinely celebrate your achievements as well as standing with you through tough situations without giving up, irrespective of the fire or storm that you would be going through. As a matter of fact, the bible teaches that it is better to have one true friend than many. We learn this from Proverbs 18:24 which reads (AMP): 24The man of too many friends [chosen indiscriminately] will be broken in pieces and come to ruin, But there is a [true, loving] friend who [is reliable and] sticks closer than a brother. To be precise, when people mark you as a negative gossiper, all you wind up with are friends that cannot be relied on in ‘stormy weather’.
At JuaLink, Lulu seemed to have an affinity for those kinds of friends. Did you notice that most of them were ‘fair weather’? After the news of her employment termination hit the headlines, her so-called buddies would no longer pick her calls nor respond to the publicity officer’s text messages. Instead, each friend dropped off one by one, leaving Lulu to ‘face the music’.
When it came to the golden calf saga, Aaron must have acquired a number of fake friends too, since we see him breaking boundaries and stooping so low to the extent of allowing his supervisees to instruct him to go against God’s standard, whereas he (Aaron) was the one supposed to be in charge.