What are friends for?

I have been thinking this thought a little bit lately. I have been thinking about my friends. Many of the things that I've learned about life and myself were from my friends and from observing my friendships.
When I worked at as a camp counselor this summer I made friends with some of my co-workers. They were all very different. I observed them and how they treated me and other people. There were a lot of good things I saw in them, and I tried to understand the good traits in these people so that I could also develop those good traits in myself. For example, one friend I had was always very nice and positive. She was polite and friendly even when she was not having a good day. So I talked to her about it and she explained to me the reasons why she would be nice. She basically explained that she was looking through the perspective of other people, and she understood how other people were effected depending on whether or not she was nice to them. She said something like "If we are mean to somebody, they will see us as just another person that doesn't care." That really put it into perspective for me. I still am not nice to people all the time or friendly all the time, but just knowing that having that perspective can help me work towards that is helpful. I have noticed some difference in myself towards that though. It takes a lot of work to shift my way of thinking.
I usually observe my friendships more when I am closer with a person. I want to learn about myself and about them and to grow into a better person through the experiences and lessons I learn from them. I think it helps me to appreciate my friends more when I try to learn from them. One reason for that is because I look for the positive qualities in them as something that I can try to add to myself.
Another example is how I have been trying to learn from one of my other friends. Even before I began working at camp I knew that there were positive qualities about this person that I needed to develop in myself. In the beginning of my time working at camp, I wrote in my journal "I think I'm starting to take on some of the positive qualities of -my friend-. I can be friends with girls now."
This was 6 months ago. For some reason which I don't care to explain I was just very unwilling and reluctant to be friends with girls. But after that, I did make friends with a bunch of people of both genders, and it shattered a lot of the thought structures that I had developed in my mind that were keeping me from growing.
The beautiful thing about this is that it is one of those things where I can see God working in my life. I noticed it several months before I was a camp counselor, that God was teaching me to accept females as real people and stop being sexist and prejudice against girls.
So after I realized that, I just kept seeing it more and more how I was changing so much. Every friendship I have now, I can learn something about myself and there is potential for me to grow and be a better person. I think that my friendships are gifts that God gives me.
It has overwhelmed me at times, when I look at all the relationships that I have and I see how God is really intimately involved in my life through them. It amazes me more than anything to think of how deeply and how much God is thinking about me. The way I think about it, is that God works through people. When someone does something good that helps another person, it is because God in them was working through them or God was leading them to do the thing. After I realized that it changed the way I prayed for other people too. When I had the idea to pray for someone yesterday, I thought of it as God telling me to pray that thing. I know that God loves people, and I don't think it would be possible for me to love someone more or want more good than God already wants for them. So as I prayed for my friend, I did not think of it as me doing anyone any favors. I thought of it as God sharing His hopes and desires with me, as a way for Him to share the joy of blessing my friend that I was praying for with me. So at the same time I thanked God for putting the prayer in my heart.
Well those are a few things that God had me learn through having friends. I think that there are vital life lessons that are impossible to learn without friends.