1. Jesus taught us to love one another.
The Golden Rule—“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Mt. 7:12)
The Great Commandment—“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt. 22:37-39)
Proverbs 17:17—“A friend loves at all times.”
We are to love each other and definitely not to hate each other. In loving each other, we are also in relationship with one another. No one as a Christian as well as a human being is in isolation of others. We live and thrive in community with others.
The only way to avoid problems in interpersonal relationships is to not have any. You become a recluse. But as human beings, we have been created for relationships. God sought for companionship and created Adam. Adam wanted a relationship that was more than caring for God’s created order so God created Eve. And we know the rest of the story.
In Psalm 8, we read that in God’s majestic creation, God made human beings a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor. In God’s image, God created us. This divine/sacred creation of human beings means that inasmuch that we respect and praise God, we respect and praise each other.
2. Your Personal Relationships
The bottom line here is that we treat each other as divine beings. Someone once said, “Don’t walk ahead of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
Maintaining the practice of “traditional roles,” when not all members are in agreement is one of the warning signs that lead to the straining of relationships. “If the context describes, the members subscribe, they ascribe!”
Your Spouse/Significant Other New Friends
Your Name
Old Friends Children/Dependents
3. Discussion—Change is inevitable and affects our relationships. To improve relationships throughout the life span, one needs to expect and anticipate change to happen—nothing remains still. For example:
A. Your Children/Dependents—Dependent, Independent, Interdependent
As Parents—Independent, Dependent
Our children move from being dependent as babies and children to becoming independent from us beginning in high school and physically separated from us in the college years and beyond. They become interdependent when they realized that they can appreciate and value what they have received from us as parents. At the end of our lives, there’s a reversal of roles. We as parents who are now independent become dependent on our children who then serve as our care providers.
B. Your Spouse/Significant Other—Dating, Marriage, Intimacy, Family, Mutual Affection, Senior Years
We relate with our spouse/significant other as the most important person in our lives. He/she is my “Honey.” This relationship continues from the dating years leading to marriage and intimacy. When family arrives, we learn to relate from the perspective of our children. We even call each other “Daddy or Mommy” like the way our children see us. We may even call each other from the perspectives of our grandchildren (Yeh Yeh).
With life expectancy projected to be much longer, we can plan on many more years beyond the years of family rearing. We may need to rediscover the way we related before our children and grandchildren came into our lives. These are the mutual affection and senior years.
Instead of physical intimacy, we discover social interests, intellectual, spiritual relationships and in a lesser degree a physical relationship. Eventually, during the latter parts of senior years, the relationship of care-giving is just as meaningful as previous stages of spousal relationships. These can be as simple as preparing meals for each other and by being by one’s bedside.
How do we maintain healthy relationships? Three points:
1. The couple that listens together stays together. A couple shows their love and caring by trying to listen well. The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen more and talk less. Some skills are: active listening, taking your partner’s perspective (A Native American proverbs says, “Don’t judge a person until you have walked two moons in their moccasins.” Get inside their skins and see the world through their eyes. “Your view of you” and “my view of you.” “Your view of me” and “my view of me.” are four views!), showing that you are listening by body language, and reflecting feelings (four common mistakes—interrupting, talking too much, being too judgmental, and giving patronizing advice).
2. Caring for someone shows that you love and care for him/her. You attend to their welfare, look after their interests and provide for them. Show care through verbal, vocal, bodily communication and caring actions. Failing to appreciate openly your partner’s caring behaviors, you lower the chances of these behaviors being repeated. Caring for self is not selfishness but that you prize yourself sufficiently to consider that you are worthy of care.
3. Happy couples create and cultivate intimacy. You express your love by wanting to know and be known by one another. By about two to one, women want more closeness than men. Five kinds of intimacy: personal (revealing secrets), emotional (sharing feelings), intellectual (sharing ideas and opinions), spiritual (sharing religious beliefs and philosophies of life), and relationship (sharing thoughts about your relationship).
C. Are your relationships with Old Friends and New Friends more like?
winter or spring
basket of eggs or building blocks
agony or ecstasy
sand castle or fortress
chess or spin the bottle
welcome mat or no trespassing
cozy or rocky
The stereotype of being cranky or “set in your old ways” is nothing more than self-fulfilling stereotypes. There may be some medical causes for this stereotype but this can be monitored today.
Keeping old friends as well as making new friends is a life-long joy. Life is too short to hold a grudge with an old friend. Life is too short to not make new friends. Like the VISA billboard campaign says, “Life takes VISA!” For instance, “Life is keeping old friends and making new ones!”
Many seniors are able to travel together as friends and to meet new friends.
“Senior Wisdom Circle” is an opportunity to draw from life experience to help the younger generation. Might this be a ministry that we as a group of mature adults might consider doing for the youth at our church?
4. The Parable of the Prodigal and His Brother (Luke 15:11-32)
When we were younger, we saw ourselves as the Prodigal Son, rebellious and defiant. When I read this parable with Asian American eyes, I sympathized with the “older son,” being disciplined and obedient. When I became a father, I identified with the forgiving father when our son mismanaged his college checking account. When I think wholistically, I wonder where the mother in this story was and how she and others in the extended family might have guided both sons and collaborated with the father. The point is that we experience different roles in family relationships during our lifetimes. Nothing remains the same—change happens.
1. What is the first word you think of when you hear the word forgiveness? What does forgiveness mean to you?
2. If you were the Prodigal Son, would you have returned home? Why or why not?
3. If you were the father, how might you have responded to your son’s return?
This is the point of this parable. Although the prodigal son may have been disobedient, it’s the father who takes the initiative to welcome back the strayed son and grants forgiveness unconditionally.
4. As you look at your life, are you more like the son who left home or the son who stayed home?
Are you still waiting for someone in your life to forgive you, even when those persons are not here anymore? God forgives you—that may be sufficient.
5. Think of times when you felt forgiven. What feelings did you experience? Jot them down.
6. Have you ever found it difficult to forgive another person? How do you deal with hurt and anger so that you are able to forgive another?
7. Have you known a situation where human forgiveness seemed almost as complete as God’s?
One recent example is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid was abolished when there was no revenge for violence committed.
5. The Gift of Love—1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
6. Closing: “The Man Who Loved a Tree,” Does God Have a Big Toe?, Marc Gellman, New York: Harper Collins, 1989.
DN 6/24/2006