Have you ever walked around unknowingly with toilet paper stuck on the bottom of their shoe? Or have you ever sung the lyrics to a song for the hundredth time only to realize they weren’t the correct lyrics? Have you ever broken up with a boyfriend only to realize that none of your friends or family members liked the guy anyways?

I would have to say yes to all of those questions! I’ve walked a few hours with toilet paper stuck to my shoe bottom, I’ve sung the lyrics incorrectly for forever before realizing they were different than I remembered, and I’ve had my loved ones all tell me they hated the guy I broke up with after months of dating him. These situations leave me wondering why someone — anyone — couldn’t have told me the truth about myself. After all, isn’t that what friends are for?

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 tells us, “Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.” The whole point of doing life together with friends is that two are better than one. We’re supposed to be able to see when a friend is falling and help them back up to where they need to be. A vital part of friendship is speaking words, in trust and in truth, to one another that may be hard to say and hard to hear, but are absolutely necessary to help keep your friends standing upright. So, what do you do when you see a friend making a mistake or harming themself unintentionally or sinning without understanding the consequences? Do you say something?

Honestly, most of us want to say something — especially in the bigger parts of our friends’ lives — but we just don’t know how to have those hard conversations. We love each other, we want to speak the truth, but how do you even start a conversation like that?

1. Start with love. I am a stubborn girl and I really hate being told what to do. If a person I barely know came to me out of the blue with a long list of criticisms, I would most likely narrow my eyes and go for the kill. I (I’m not saying this is my best quality) can bring a person to their emotional knees with just a few quips and my natural tendency is to react badly to the critic. Which is exactly why we should never seek to criticize our friend. It all starts with love. Proverbs 17:17 tells us, “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” So, question whether your motive comes from love when you think you need to speak a truth into your friend’s life: ask yourself “Am I being prideful by saying this? Am I being critical? Is this helpful to my friend? Would this person accept what I have to say as a continuation of the love I’ve already been showing them lately?” If the goal of what you want to say is to build up the person (remember, they’re falling and we’re there to help them get up again) and not to tear them down further, then you’re starting with love. Just like Ephesians 3:15 tells us, we’re to be “speaking the truth in love.”
2. Speak the truth plainly. Have you ever played the game CatchPhrase? The object is to get your team to say a word by describing the word, talking about the word, and saying synonyms to close variations of the word, but you aren’t allowed to actually say that word. If we tried to approach speaking a necessary truth into our friends’ life in a round-about and indirect way, they’re going to miss the word we know they need to hear. Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” If you’re going to sharpen your friend, you’ve got to be willing to get to the point. If you really believe that your friend is falling and needs help up, you’ve got to be willing to say that word of warning directly, firmly, and plainly. If a rocket was headed right for your friend’s head, would you tell them, “In a kind of sort of quicker way, you should probably consider that going lower than you were right now — but you’re great just like you are! — would be a pretty good decision if you feel like it….” No, you’d probably just say “DUCK!” When you have to have a hard conversation with your friend, it’s best to just get to the point. “I love you and I consider you one of my best friends. But I’ve noticed you’ve been ________ and it really has me concerned for you.”
3. Offer help. You walk, I walk; you run, I run; you fall, I laugh. Funny saying, but that’s not exactly how a true friend works. If you’re willing to take the effort to love someone and take the effort to directly speak a specific truth into their life, then you can’t leave them hanging. Always leave these types of conversations with a positive note instead. By offering to help, through accountability or with a suggested method that you’ve found or a route they could consider to remove themselves from a harmful situation, and then reminding them of your love and available presence, you’re able to positively impact your friend for the better through this hard conversation. Don’t just say what’s wrong: offer help with making it right. For instance, if your friend is expressing interest in a guy that’s clearly a wrong choice for her biblically, don’t just tell her the guy’s a loser: offer to help keep her accountable in no longer investing her emotions into him, offer to help her find ways to meet a better guy, offer to hang out during times when she may be particularly lonely. A lot of times our dear friends would make better choices for themselves if they only had someone to help them stand back up and walk the right path with them.
4. Give away the outcome. End the conversation with a prayer and a hug: these show your intentions of love in their life. But then choose to leave the decision with your friend. Often when we have these hard conversations of speaking truth into our friends’ lives, we want to just make the decision for them or bombard them into making a right choice that wasn’t really what they wanted. This never works out. If we give the outcome of our hard conversations to God, we can continue praying that our friend makes the positive, biblical choice without adding pressure for them to make a decision they haven’t thought through. We put love, effort, thought, and work into this conversation: give your friend time to make their choice as well. And in the end, we know that only the Holy Spirit can really use your words of wisdom to convict your friend’s conscience.

Proverbs 27:9 tells us, “Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man’s friend by hearty counsel.” One of the most important parts of friendship is trusting your friends to speak into your life when you’re not making good decisions. The counsel of our friends is meant to be sweet! Don’t neglect loving your friends God’s out of fear of hurting their feelings: they need to hear your loving words of truth in their seasons of change and choices. Love your friends dearly and wholly. May God bless your hard conversations!

Love, Meghan