Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.
Interpretation
True friends may point out your flaws to help you grow and improve.
This quote by Timothy Keller emphasizes the idea that genuine friendship involves honest communication and sometimes uncomfortable truths. Just like a surgeon performs necessary procedures to aid healing, friends may confront you about your shortcomings or mistakes, ultimately aiming for your personal growth and well-being.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of honesty in relationships.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
We form an association of brothers in all points of the globe ... yet there is one unseen that can hardly be felt, yet it weighs on us. Whence comes it? Where is it? No one knows ... or at least no one tells. This association is secret even to us the veterans of the Secret Societies.
I have no trouble with y enemies. But my god damn friends... they are the ones that keep me walking the floors at night.
Friendship, "the wine of life," should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed.
I dedicate the merit of the occasion to all beings. This gesture of universal friendship has been likened to a drop of fresh spring water. If we put it on a rock in the sunshine, it will soon evaporate. If we put it in the ocean, however, it will never be lost. Thus the wish is made that we not keep the teachings to ourselves but to use them to benefit others.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
When I do retire, I will miss the trips with the team, the jokes with my teammates, the habits: having breakfast with them, playing with them, all the little things.
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