Relationships

This week I'm feeling all the feelings humans can muster, it seems.

Relating is work. No fooling this April Fool's Day!

It's work that is arduous and timely, yet necessary for tranquility in hearts, homes, and cities, let alone the world.

Relationships take time and trust to begin and grow.

They entail presence, continuity, availability, and, predicting that one will be there in a consistent manner at home, at school, at work, at play, at prayer, in fact.

Relating with others is much like relating with the Creator.

Precious time and patience is required daily, and, often throughout the day.

Human foibles may prevent these required elements in fostering rapport.

The maker's address never changes, it seems to me. Mine does.

Perhaps your own does also.

Stability is God's anchor. Mine is the Ground of all Being. For wellness in relating, I must
go to the Creator regularly and with routine each day, or else.

Or else, problems, fracture, and more confronts relationships.

Resolving conflict requires knowing, admitting and saying to the other(s) what I'm feeling in conflictual situations with familiy, friends, and acquaintances.

Naming my feelings of mad, sad, glad or scared, or variations of these is key.

Listing judgements about the current conflict one is facing is required work also.
Judgements are in the head. Feelings in the heart. Choices are decisions. We make them each hour, or minute of the day when rising, for example.

What one wants from the one I am in conflict with in any given situation also needs to be voiced clearly, concretely for effect and fruitful communicating and relations.

So, therefore, what I will do to make the relationship work is entailed.

Work.

Hard work.

We're all better for working at them, as opposed to throwing out others in a relationship when conflict buoys and emerges.

Like marriage that entails skills to relate well, every other encounter with humans demands listening twice as long as I speak.

Two ears remind me of that. One mouth means I wait, assess and hear what's beneath the words of another. Easy does it.

They make the world go round.

They do. Relationships are like that. They are.

Really.

Thanks be to God who hewns us in relating.

Holy week for believers gets us feeling fully all the feelings of the 150 psalms of the Bible.
They're all there.

Betrayal by Judas. Denial by Peter. Fear by rulers, and Jesus, I'm sure. Anger. Defeat.
Wonderment. Mad people, sad people. Glad. Afraid folks also.

The full gamut of feelings and emotions.

And, more in the mess of Jesus' dying and crucifixion we recall this Good Friday all the way up to Easter Sunday's huge celebration for 50 days. That's ten more days than Lent. Rising is huge. Jesus triumphs death and all the stuff that makes us humans.

Virtue begins in building relations.

Easy does do it in relating.