While friends do (and should) encourage and uplift us, they should also create edifying wounds. These wounds aren’t meant to break or destroy us but, through their pain, lead us to growth. Like a vinedresser cutting away the dead vines or the sculptor carving away imperfections, our friendships should sharpen us—but such sharpening isn’t always comfortable.

“I have good news and bad news. God has called us to move back home.”

Our friend’s words stunned me. He told us God was leading him and his family, whom we had grown to see as our own family, to move back to his hometown.

My emotions moved like the sea line. One hour I fought sadness, another I struggled with loneliness, another moment fear surged through me, and yet another anger boiled in me. Though I initially directed my feelings at my friends, I later saw they were truly directed at God.

Why did you give us these close friends? I cried out to him. Why did you bring us together in such deep friendships only to tear them away from us two years later?

In the wake of that announcement, I’m not sure I loved my friends as well as I would have said I did.

Love Grows with Knowledge and Discernment

On earth, we will never reach a point of loving one another perfectly (because we are each still in our sinful flesh), yet we can always be growing in our love for one another.

The Thessalonians modelled this. In his first letter to them, Paul exclaimed his gratitude for their labor of love (1 Thess. 1:2–3), and in his second letter he declared that their love had grown ever greater (2 Thess. 1:3). Could someone say the same of your love for others? Has your love grown ever greater?

Perhaps we must first consider: How does our love grow? It grows in knowledge and discernment, which can only be produced from Scripture. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “And I pray this: that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9–11).

Our love should be based on knowledge—our knowledge of how we were first loved by the Savior (1 John 4:19). It’s according to this love by which God covered us that we love others—with grace, selflessness, and truth. We love one another with knowledge of the truth, always seeking to encourage them in further holiness.

Is your love founded in this kind of knowledge and discernment? What does it look like to live this way?

Allowing God to Lead Them

A week after my dear friend told me they were moving, God led me to a passage in Acts:

While we were staying [in Caesarea] for many days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. And coming to us, he took Paul’s belt and bound his own feet and hands and said, ‘Thus says the Holy Spirit, “This is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” When we heard this, we and the people there urged him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, “What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 21:9–14)

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