Advice for College Students Part 2

This is a continuation of "Advice for College Students" written by Blake Hudson. Part one (with points 1 and 2) can be found here.

3. Be friendly to everyone. Make close friends with only a few people.
     I learned this lesson once during my last year and a half of college, and I learned it again with a new group of people in graduate school. While two, three, or four years seems like a long time when you enroll, the time whittles itself away pretty fast. This leaves you with limited opportunities to develop significant relationships, which means that you can't be close friends with everyone. Also, becoming close friends with a few people of the same gender makes it much easier for you to continue the friendship after graduation. After college, your housing will change, your diet will change, and your job will change from being a student to being a professional of some sort, but close Christian friends can and should remain the same, for the most part. It is most important that these friends are Christians and that they love God more than they love you. That way, they won't leave you when they get to know you :D.  We all have faults, and we need friends to point us to the truth of sin and Christ's sacrifice to put things in perspective. We don't need friends who won't tell us those things.

4. Don't try to become best friends with someone of the opposite sex.
     This subject is highly controversial and confusing in our culture, but it seems to me that making close friends with someone of the opposite sex is essentially dating. For a Christian who believes that God has ordained marriage to be a wonderful, sanctifying, and God-glorifying relationship, maintaining a close friendship with someone of the opposite sex that you do not intend to move towards marriage with is confusing at best and unloving at worst. That relationship will have to be removed from your life in order for you to marry somebody else, or you will realize that you are (and have been) dating your friend and that you should consider marriage together. This does not mean that you should not befriend people of the opposite sex! You absolutely should befriend believers and nonbelievers of both genders, and you should expect any relationship that leads to marriage to begin as friendship. If you are spending lots of time alone with someone, however, then it's time for a DTR.