We all need friends who can encourage our dreams.

We need the people around us to constantly push us forward and sometimes cheer us on when we suffer a setback. We need people to believe in us.

We need friends who know our hearts; As much as we ourselves must seek to know the hearts of our friends.

People who know our dreams and desires. People who know what gives us hope, what makes us stumble, what brings us joy and what reminds us of pain.

In The Lord of the Rings, as brave as Frodo was, he couldn’t have done it without the help of his companions, Aragon, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, and his 3 Hobbit friends. Without their support and help, I would have perished against the forces of evil.

Our lives are more or less a journey and many times a battle. A journey riddled with traps, detours, and even enemies along the way, and we need a camaraderie.

Not your typical ‘Hello Goodbye’ friends; they are great, but you need a lot of close allies; friends that you can trust your dreams; friends who will protect you and drive you to achieve them.

Friends who know you.

Do you have friends like that? Not just the kind of friends who will hang out with you on Friday nights. But friends who know you.

During this week, something happened recently with one of my friends from church; she really wanted to get a job and after going through 3 interviews, she didn’t get the job she wanted.

So that day, she was a disaster because she is a first class honors student and hopefully she got what she was looking for.

Well, my friends from church got together that night for dinner and we encouraged her that everything would work out in the end, and we comforted her; We also joked with her to bring her joy and prayed together with her that she would finally get the job.

You know, we need friends like this; people who can fight for us when we are weak. People who will comfort us when we’re down and people who put faith in our hearts when we don’t see any hope of something good happening in our lives.

Go out and find friends like that; people who have hopes and dreams; they are the ones who can encourage their own.

But as someone said, if you want to have a friend, first be a friend.

If you want people like that around you, first be someone like that too!

Regardless, though irrelevant, our prayers were fulfilled the next morning when she messaged all of us that her first-choice company called her to confirm her placement at that job.