Dear Friend,
If you’ve ever seen a blade being sharpened against a spinning grindstone, you’ve seen the sparks fly—bright, fast, and a little startling if you’re not used to it. The sparks are just friction announcing itself, and the friction is the whole point. Nobody grinds an edge hoping for silence. Silence means the blade isn’t touching anything, and a blade that isn’t touching anything never gets sharper.
This November, my wife and I will mark thirty years of marriage. Thirty years, for us, has never meant thirty years without any friction at all. It’s meant thirty years of two different people, each carrying our own history into the same home, learning how to become one family instead of two.
We came into this marriage the way a lot of second marriages do: not as two blank pages, but as two people who’d already been shaped, and in some places scarred, by everything that came before. We each brought children from earlier chapters of our lives, and joining two sets of kids under one roof is not the tidy montage the movies promise you. It’s two sets of habits, two sets of wounds, two sets of instincts about how a home is supposed to run, suddenly expected to share the same kitchen table. In those early years there were real sparks—the kind that come from two histories being pressed together for the first time, each of us still learning where the other one’s tender places were.
Solomon wrote something short enough to miss if you’re reading fast: “iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17). Picture what that verse actually describes. Two pieces of iron don’t sharpen each other by sitting side by side, agreeable and untouched. They sharpen each other by being pressed together, hard, until the friction wears away whatever was dull. Those early years were our coarse grinding—the kind of sharpening that throws visible sparks because two blades are meeting for the first time, still finding their edges against each other. I won’t pretend those years were painless, or that we always handled the friction well.
But thirty years into this marriage now, the sharpening looks different, and I think it’s worth telling you how. These days, when something flares between us, it’s almost never because we’re fighting over who’s right. It’s because one of us has bumped, without meaning to, against a place in the other that still carries some old pain. And what happens next isn’t a clash of blades. It’s closer to watching two people catch themselves mid-motion, go gentle with each other almost instantly, and choose to love each other through whatever the moment just uncovered.
That’s not the grinding wheel anymore. That’s a hone—the fine leather strop a craftsman reaches for once the grinding is done, drawing the blade across it again and again, with no spark at all, and yet the edge keeps getting sharper. A hone doesn’t correct a blade through force. It corrects it through contact, patient and light, applied exactly where the edge needs it. That’s closer to what my wife and I have now: not the absence of sharpening, but a much finer kind of it.
Solomon also warned about the alternative: “If the axe is dull, and one does not sharpen the edge, he must use more strength, but wisdom helps one to succeed” (Ecclesiastes 10:10). A dull axe still swings. It just costs far more to get far less done, and eventually the wood wins. I’ve watched marriages go quiet the wrong way—not honed, just dull, both people keeping the peace by keeping their distance, avoiding the strop because even light contact feels like too much work. That’s not the maturity it can look like from the outside. It’s just two blades that stopped touching.
The kind of sharpening I’m describing only works with both truth and love in the same motion. Paul gave the whole church an instruction that applies just as well at a kitchen table: “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). Truth without love just cuts. Love without truth never sharpens anything. What my wife and I finally learned, after enough years of practice, is how to name the tender place honestly the moment we touch it, and reach for gentleness in almost the same breath. That combination is what turned our grinding into honing.
If you’re in a season where the friction still feels like grinding—like real sparks, real hurt, real distance—I don’t want to suggest that’s a lesser marriage than ours. It may just be an earlier stage of the same sharpening, and Solomon’s iron doesn’t skip that stage; it starts there. But consider the difference between two blades struck against each other and two blades pressed together and drawn across. Blades that clash in anger don’t get sharper. They chip. They dull. They gouge each other, because a strike is sudden and violent and is intended to do harm, not to help. Sharpening only happens through sustained pressure and deliberate direction, one edge drawn against the other on purpose, not force thrown in a moment of anger. What I’d ask is only this: check whether the friction is the tearing-down kind, pride striking out at pride, or the sharpening kind, two people who love each other enough to keep pressing instead of walking away from the stone. Repent quickly of the first. Stay faithfully in the second, even when it costs you something, because that’s the iron doing exactly what Solomon said it would do.
As my wife and I come up on thirty years together this November, the thing I’m most grateful for isn’t a marriage that ran out of friction. It’s a marriage where the friction changed shape—where what once threw sparks now moves like a hone across leather, quiet and precise, still sharpening us both, thirty years in.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth
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Before you leave the fire, I invite you to sit with these three questions:
1. In my closest relationship, is our current friction the grinding kind or the honing kind—and how can I tell the difference?
2. When I touch a tender place in someone I love, do I reach for gentleness quickly, or do I have to fight my way there?
3. What would it look like this week to stay at the stone in an honest disagreement, instead of letting the blade go dull through silence?
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I think that it's important to add a third element to ponder. If I'm in a conflict with someone and THEY hit a painful spot in me, do I shut down? Do I strike back? Do I ignore it?