Building Spiritual Friendships
We’ve been talking about the three components necessary to self-awareness and self-management: Listening, Willingness, and Community.
We’ve talked about willingness, and now we’re going to talk about how to be in spiritual community with others in a way that helps you move further along on this spiritual journey to God-honoring self-awareness and self-management.
So what is a Spiritual Friendship?
Would you consider your closest friends as spiritual friends?
Spiritual Friendships are an essential part of our spiritual growth as we seek to be more self-aware. Finding and building into these friendships is embracing the gift of community that God has gifted to us for our good and the good of others.
Soul friends “seek to meet each other as whole people and help each other become whole people.” – David Benner, Sacred Companions
- Who are people currently in your life or in your past who have been spiritual friends to you?
- What was the impact on your life because of those friendships?
- Prayerfully ask God to bring to mind one or two people with whom you might foster this type of spiritual friendship.
- Do your best to connect with these people this week.
Test Yourself
Answer
Think About It:
-
Mandy said that loving yourself is a necessary part of being in a spiritual friendship because we don’t come into the relationship projecting our needs on the other person. When you think of your spiritual friendships in your past, do you feel like you were in a place that you loved yourself in a healthy way and were able to come to the relationship without projecting needs onto the other person that were not their needs to meet?
-
Whether it was as healthy as it could have been, what was it for you to have this sort of spiritual friendship relationship in your life?
You Did it!
Congratulations on finishing this lesson!
If you feel like you are ready to take a quiz to review what you have learned in this lesson, go on to the next step. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to review the last few topics again.