Recently, I was sitting beside a 20 year old’s mom on a plane. The mom explained that her daughter was transferring colleges because of the friendships she had made at her first school. She was trying to make wise decisions, but her friendships at college made that very difficult.

Isn’t that interesting? Her friendships were moving her in a direction she didn’t want to go, and the only way to stop the movement… was to move. I think that reveals a powerful principle about friendship.

All friendships move you to a new place, but not all friendships move you to the right place.

If you want to make wise decisions, you’ll need to be wise in choosing your friendships. If your current friendships aren’t with wise people, eventually you’ll start moving in an unwise direction. In order to change directions, you’ll have to move away from your current friendships. That may not mean leaving the city, but it will mean changing who you spend time with.

If you continually hang out with people who don’t value what you value, eventually you’ll be forced to either change your values… or change your friendships. You can’t keep both.

And that’s what makes friendship so important. It’s powerful. It moves us. But if we’re not careful, we could get moved somewhere we don’t want to be.