A dear friend of mine and I had an email discussion about friendship and being “relational”. I also heard the word again in church today. So, it got me to thinking. What is being relational?
I shared with my friend that I had grown up pretty much feral. Once we could feed and dress ourselves, we were pretty much left to our own devices. The way I grew up, we were essentially just six people who happened to live in the same house. My mom, grandmother, my two brothers my sister and me. Everyone had their own agenda and we did not do much of any talking or planning to do things as a family. There was no talk over the dinner table about how anyone’s day was or what had happened at work. We pretty much sat down, ate, cleaned up and went out own ways.
I am pretty much thinking that “being relational” is a learned behaviour. Rather than being inated or genetic, it is something that is learned by watching and interacting with others. If you live in a household like mine was, I think it might be hard to learn this behaviour.
For the longest time, it has been preached to me that to be loved, you need to be useful and “good”. That meant not making waves, and being helpful in any was possible. So, that is how I have operated up to now. It is not necessarily a bad way to operate. But, it does set you up to being used at times by those whose motives are not pure and good.
Being useful and good and being realtional are not mutually exclusive. But, they can exist separately from each other. I am still at a loss though when someone says to me “do you want to be relational”? What exactly does that entail….? I know it has something to do with experiencing life with each other… sharing, growing, listening, feeling, ….all those other “ing” words.
Maybe the question should be….are you willing to show me how to be relational?
