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There’s an old proverb found in scripture that says: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens the wits of another.” I preached a sermon on that proverb last week, but I wanted to share it with the larger community. This proverb is a wonderful reminder that we don’t grow as people in isolation. We grow through contact. Specifically, through contact with people who are different enough from us to make us think.
Think about what it actually takes to sharpen a blade. You don’t sharpen a knife by rubbing it against a smooth cloth. You need something with rough edges, something that creates friction. Similarly, we need the friction of meeting each other's rough edges. That friction is uncomfortable. It wears material away. But it’s also the only thing that produces a sharper edge. A knife sharpened only by contact with its own reflection would stay dull forever. I think we’ve forgotten this about each other.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us started treating our differences as reasons to avoid one another rather than as the very friction that helps us grow. If a neighbor votes differently, worships differently, or sees the world through a different lens, it’s become easier to write them off or to cast them as the enemy rather than to stay in the same room with them. We surround ourselves with people who already agree with us, and we call that comfort “peace.” But it isn’t peace. It’s just dullness. It’s a blade that never meets anything rough enough to sharpen it.
Here’s what worries me most: the people and forces that benefit from our division know this. They know that a divided community is easier to manipulate than a connected one. So they work hard--through headlines, through algorithms, and through soundbites designed to provoke rather than inform--to convince us that the person across the political aisle, or the person who looks and speaks differently, or who worships differently, is our enemy. That if we could just get rid of them, or silence them, or stop having to deal with them, things would finally be okay.
But our neighbors are not our enemies. The forces that profit from convincing us they are, those are the real threat. And every time we let those forces succeed, every time we let a headline or a slogan replace an actual relationship with an actual human being, we lose a little more of our capacity to grow. We stop being sharpened. We just get duller, more easily controlled, and more alone.
I don’t say any of this to suggest our differences don’t matter, or that every disagreement is secretly a gift in disguise. Some disagreements are painful. Some cost us real things: old assumptions, old comforts, sometimes old relationships that can’t survive the honesty required to keep them. Sharpening was never described as gentle. It’s described as scraping something away. We absolutely lose parts of ourselves that do not serve who we are becoming when we allow ourselves to be sharpened in this way.
But in losing our rough edges through sharpening, others are sharpened, too. And we end up gaining so much more than we lose. If we can start seeing the people who differ from us as neighbors first, before we let anyone convince us to see them as opponents, if we can stay curious about why someone believes what they believe, instead of assuming the worst reason we can imagine, if we can remember that underneath every disagreement we have with another person, that we are looking at someone who is just as human as we are, then we will all benefit.
This is, I’ll admit, easier to write than to practice. I don’t always manage it myself. But I keep starting again. I keep thinking. I keep listening. I keep trying to connect even when another person's rough edges scrape.
We need each other’s rough edges. Not despite our differences, but because of them. So, the next time someone challenges you, unsettles you, or simply sees the world in a way you don’t understand, I’d ask you to try something before you block them from your life or your feed: consider that this might be exactly what growth feels like. Not comfortable. Not easy. But necessary. It is the ordinary, difficult work of two people becoming sharper because they were willing to stay in contact with one another.
Our neighbors were never the enemy. Let’s stop treating them like one.
Pastor Stacy Chrise-Tritt serves as the Pastor of the Country Roads Charge in Morgantown, and is writing as a member of the Morgantown Faith Leaders Network.