I once had a bad habit of setting up my single friends on dates with each other. The problem is that people aren’t pawns, and relationships aren’t party tricks. We start engineering closeness and managing one another’s seasons, treating friends like projects in the name of helping. If we can stop managing people and start loving them, we might find ourselves living into the simplest, hardest calling Jesus gave us: to love God and to love others as ourselves. Carry their burden alongside them, like the friends in Mark 2 who tore through a roof to lay their paralyzed friend before Jesus.