How To Friend: Love

In this final episode of the How to Friend series, I'll share a personal story about a season when I wasn't showing up as the best version of myself and the grace-filled friendships that helped me find my way back.

Together, we'll explore what love really looks like in friendship—honest conversations, healthy boundaries, accountability, forgiveness, and the kind of grace that leaves room for growth.

We'll also reflect on the four key ingredients of meaningful friendship: loyalty, companionship, encouragement, and love.

Because friendship isn't about finding perfect people. It's about learning how to love imperfect people well.

The Book Experience: click here for information. 

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Transcript

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Life doesn't always unfold the way we imagine. But sometimes the most beautiful growth begins when we choose to move forward anyway. Welcome to She Moves Forward. I'm Christy Filaney, and this is a space of honest conversations about becoming. Becoming more grounded, more authentic, more connected, and more fully yourself. Because healing happens in community. And none of us were meant to do life alone. Let's move forward together. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the podcast. This is She Moves Forward with myself, Christy Filaney, and I am a life coach for women. Today I hope that this episode finds you in an amazing space inside your friendships. And if you have been following along for the last three episodes, you know that we are in a series called How to Friend. Now, in the first episode, I talked to you about how being loyal to your friends can completely strengthen the bond between you and those people that you want to be close with in a friendship. And then in the second episode, you heard me talk about companionship, about how being there for each other through all seasons of life, the good ones, the hard ones, the neutral ones, where we're just kind of floating through life are also important to creating those bonds inside the friendships, the connections that you want with your friends, and how encouragement can be the backbone of creating long and lasting friendships. So today is installment number four in the series, and it is the final installment inside the series of How to Friend. Now, I hope you're gonna be okay with this, but inside today's episode, I plan on getting very real. I plan on being vulnerable, I plan on opening myself up so that hopefully you know me a little bit better, but also there's gonna be an opportunity for you to see yourself inside what I'm gonna share with you today. And so I hope that you will approach this episode with an open heart and an open mind. And I hope that you are going to offer yourself some grace. If this episode resonates with you, I hope that you are going to offer yourself the same amount of grace that I had to offer to myself. So are you ready for it? I want to start this particular episode off with a story. A story about me. You see, because here recently I have been carrying a tremendous amount of hurt in my personal life, a tremendous amount of turmoil where I'm leaning a lot into my friendships and a lot into my relationship with God. And I'm gonna tell you a very vulnerable story because I did not realize how much this particular hurt was actually affecting my friendships. You see, I was trying to keep moving forward. I was trying to function, I was trying to manage everything that was happening around me. But the truth is the pain that I was carrying began to cloud my judgment. I wasn't showing up as the best version of myself. In fact, my responses to certain situations weren't the way that I would normally respond. And I wasn't acting like the woman that my friends have known for several years. In fact, I was behaving so out of character that two of my closest friends that I was spending the evening with were genuinely confused. Like looking back at the situation, I think the question that they were probably asking themselves was who is this person that we're seeing right now? And honestly, I understand why they felt that way. What they were seeing wasn't really me. It was a hurting version of me, a wounded version of me, a version of me that was allowing pain to influence my choices and influence my behavior. And what I appreciated so much is that my friends didn't ignore what was happening, they didn't walk away either. They recognized that something deeper was going on. They recognized that I was hurting. And because they cared about me and cared about our friendship, they chose to have a difficult conversation. They told me the truth. They gave me the opportunity to apologize for the way that I had behaved. They gave me the opportunity to make amends where amends needed to be made. They were honest about the impact that my behavior was having. And they were also clear about the boundaries that they needed to have. And at the time, those conversations weren't easy, they were in fact incredibly uncomfortable. And looking back, I can see what a gift those women gave me. They gave me love, they loved me enough to tell me the truth, and they loved me enough to stay. You see, over the past few weeks, we've talked about loyalty, companionship, and encouragement. But as I have been thinking about how to wrap up this series, I kept coming back to one thing that none of those things, the loyalty, the companionship, the encouragement, none of those things really work without love. Love is what gives loyalty its staying power. Love is what makes companionship feel so safe. And love is what allows encouragement to be honest and life-giving. Now, I don't know if you've ever experienced the kind of grace that these two friends showed me in this particular circumstance, but again, they loved me enough to stay. I'm talking about the kind of love that comes when someone could easily walk away, but chooses not to. The kind of love that says, I don't agree with what you're doing, but I'm not giving up on you. The kind of love that leaves room for growth and leaves room for healing and leaves room for redemption. When I think about this situation, I realize those women were extending the same kind of grace that comes from God. See, He is the one who sees us completely. It's tested when someone disappoints us, when someone lets us down. And it's certainly tested when having the conversations would be so much easier to avoid. And that's one of the things I think we sometimes miss when we talk about friendship, because friendship kind of love isn't just kindness, it's about support, it's about encouraging one another, it's about being honest and being brutally honest. It's about helping that friend with accountability and allowing them to speak accountability into the friendship. It's about having those difficult conversations that we don't really want to have. And sometimes love in our friendship looks like staying in the room long enough for the healing to happen. One of the scriptures that comes to mind as I was preparing this podcast episode was First Peter four eight. Above all, love each other deeply. Love each other deeply. Not casually, not when it's convenient or when it's easy, deeply. The kind of love that sees the whole person. And in that circumstance, they knew something was off. They knew that I was acting out of the character that they normally see me in. So they saw that in that time there was imperfection, but they were offering to me the kind of grace that sees the whole person, that sees the hurt and the pain going on. This is the kind of love that chooses grace without abandoning the truth. And as I reflect on this entire series, I realize that every episode has really been pointing us back to this idea. So when we talk about loyalty, we talk about the friend who stays, that's love. When we talk about the companionship, we talk about the friend who walks alongside you through the good seasons and also the difficult seasons, that is love. When we talk about encouraging each other and lifting each other up, we talk about the friend who calls out the gold and reminds us who we are. That too is love. And so now here we are. Love is the thread that connects all of it. Love is what transforms friendships from something casual into something meaningful. Love is what allows us to be fully known, fully seen, and still accepted. It's what creates the safety needed for our growth. It helps us to navigate conflict and it helps us to restore whenever restoration is possible. And if we were to summarize this entire How to Friend series, I would say it this way: a good friend stays, a good friend walks beside you, a good friend encourages you. A good friend loves you enough to tell you the truth and extend grace when it's needed the most. Those are the type of friendships that are worth investing in. And if I'm honest, those are also the kinds of friendships worth becoming. Now, before we close, I do want to encourage you to think about the women in your own life. Who has shown you loyalty? Who has walked beside you through the difficult times as well as the good times? Who has encouraged you when you needed it the most? And who has extended grace, even when you're acting a little bit out of character? And just as importantly, how are you showing up for the people around you? Because friendship isn't just about finding great friends, it's also about becoming one. And that's really been the heart behind this entire series. So before I let you go, I want to personally invite you into the book experience that I am currently doing with an amazing group of women. It's a little bit late to start in with us now because we are about halfway through the book. But we are going to begin the second book called You Are the Girl for the Job starting in August. You won't want to miss out on this experience. One of the things I love most about gathering women together is watching these very things that I've been talking about inside this series of how to friend, watching these relationships happen in real time. These women are supporting one another, they are encouraging one another, they are learning from each other, they are offering grace to one another. They are creating the kind of community that so many of us women are longing for. And so if that sounds like something your heart is craving, you'll find all of the details inside the show notes because I would love for you to join us in that space. So I just want to say thank you so much for coming along this journey with me of how to friend. And I hope that the conversations that we've had together, they have just simply encouraged you to reach out, to lean in, to invest in your friendships and the relationships that matter the most. Because at the end of the day, you know we were never meant to do life alone. Until next time, keep moving forward.