Relationships in the Wind...

Published in the Brechin Advertiser on 9 May 2013

How does that saying go? Be careful what you wish for. Here was me last week talking about building relationships and trying to keep them in good shape and WHAM out of nowhere from my point of view a few that I am involved in blow up and out of proportion to anything I could have imagined. I’m not sure if I got all the ‘vines’ sorted yet and if the ‘trees’ (see last week’s for a bit of explanation) will be back and healthy or nae but I’ll keep working on it and hopefully get it sorted.

It just keeps me reminded of two simple principles I know I have shared before and will again: 1) If you have a belly button you have a problem. 2) The problem is not the problem.

The points as should be obvious is that if you are alive there is some kind of challenge or problem you are dealing with in your life. I know even in my perfect world it is not perfect and I face daily things that leave me troubled, some that I have no control over, others that are of my own making. And the second is that often the thing that I say is the problem is only the latest problem, it is really about three problems back that I have to fix before the latest one can get sorted.

So what seems to be the biggest problem in relationships? Well more often than not it seems to me to come back to basic communication. The way we say something and it is misunderstood.  In my case too often I just don’t seem to listen, I try to listen but then I hear what I hear and sadly it is not always what was said. Alan Greenspan put it this way: ” I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant” Sadly since you have the same problem I do, the problem just gets worse and worse and we find we just don’t get what the other person said.

This affects all kinds of relationships, work, educational, shopping, trades folk, family, marriages, best friends. And perhaps shouldn’t say all kinds but ‘all’ relationships. It is communication, that ability to talk and write and say something beyond a grunt that makes it work.

I am reminded that Jesus came into the world yet he created the world in the first place. John 1 starts by saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him nothing was made that was made... And the Word became flesh and lived among us...” God Himself put a focus on the idea of word, in this case The Word, who as we read through John we realize very quickly was Jesus, the incarnation of God. As I read the OT I realize very quickly that folk there were often very much in direct contact with God, yet somehow they misunderstood what God’s plan was, so much so that one book ends with the words “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” A bit of a problem.

More to come,

Rev. Jon Bergen