All My Friends Have Issues By Amanda AndersonSample

An essential question in our quest for healthy friendships is: What do you do when your friend has been in the wrong, you’ve told her about it and given her a week to process that she’s hurt your feelings, and she still won’t offer an apology or empathy? What do you do when you use all your introspective tools and “I feel” statements and she comes back with, “Oh yeah, well you are [blank, blank, and blank]!” My advice is to run screaming from the room and the relationship, locking the door on your way out.

Okay. Maybe not that. But guard your heart, my sister. As Proverbs 27:12 says, “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.” I can’t think of anything more emotionally dangerous than a friend who can’t own her issues, especially when they have caused damage to your heart and soul. A friend that demands that you just “take her as she is” without allowing you to have any sensitivities or emotional needs is one who will hurt you again and again.

God has encouraged me to be brave many times in my life. He’s sent me into a lot of places I wouldn’t have gone without him pushing me. And yet, when I have come to him with a wounded heart from a chaotic or unsafe relationship and been willing to actually heed his instructions, never has he said, “Suck it up, girl. Get back in there and take it on the chin.” Jesus said if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn and let them strike the other, but he also said not to give pearls to swine, and he told his disciples to shake the dust off their feet in the towns where they shared the gospel and the people were unrepentant. So there must be a place of limits and boundaries within friendships too. We are to love even our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, according to Jesus, but our friendships are the places where we choose to invest in relationships that will be mutually loving. We are called to love everyone, but not to trust everyone or create emotional transparency with everyone. We each need to be refueled within the context of loving relationships so that we can do the hard work God calls us to do in the big, cruel world.