It's All About Relationship

We are inherently relational creatures. We were made for relationship. We are not independent or anonymous. We have identity and individuality, but these are the precursors for relationship. They allow us to be ourselves and to offer ourselves to others. We have personality that distinguishes us from those around us but we are not designed to be isolated from people and things around us. We must be connected, interrelated or we perish. 

This relational core to who we are is grounded in the root of our being. We were created in the image of God and God exists in eternal relationship within the three persons who make up the Godhead. We were created to enter into and relate to The Three-in-One God and this ability to relate is knit into our very being. We were literally created to relate. 

We were also created to be connected to other people. We do not come into being alone, but are born into relationship with those around us. Some of us were born into nurturing families and others into dangerous and destructive families, but we cannot survive our infancy without someone taking an interest in us and sustaining our lives. We literally can not live without community. 

As we grow up we learn to operate independently from those around us. We no longer need to be spoon-fed and diaper changed, but in this normal and healthy process of individuation and growing independence, we can begin to believe the lie that we don't need anyone else. Especially now, in an age of relative wealth and incredible technological innovation, we can live more isolated than ever. We stay continually connected with the world through our screens and keyboards, while actually living more isolated from real relationships.

We were created to connect. It is now and has always been about relationship. We were made in Their image. The image of the Trinitarian God. The Relational Community God of the scriptures. We cannot learn how to relate to God while remaining distant, isolated, or stunted in our interpersonal relationships. We must learn how to trust and to live in community with one another, or we are kidding ourselves about living with God. He has created us for community. 

It's all about relationship. It always has been. 

Life as a computer game

I think I learn more in the process of being a mentor than those I am serving. It is incredibly challenging and enriching to listen carefully to another human soul and share in their journey, then to listen carefully to what God might be saying or doing in their life. I see my role primarily as drawing the two into dialogue, the Spirit and the person sitting across from me. I'm a sort of relationship counsellor seeking to strengthen and encourage their relationship rather than inserting myself into it, or making the discussion about me. After the sessions, I continue to dialogue with God about what I have heard and their journey informs my own.

Yesterday, I had a wonderful conversation with a young man. As we talked about things in his life, an analogy came to mind...perhaps from the Spirit. It has stuck with me, haunting me for the last day or so. I found the metaphor of a computer game helped to create useful categories for the young man and for me.

Some computer games can be played in a single player mode or multi-player mode. In single player mode, you are the only sentient being in the whole world. All the other characters in your digital world are computer generated, they are Non-Player Characters, NPC's. NPC's exist only for you to interact with in one way or another, to people your world and make it more interesting in some way. There is little or no actually morality involved in how you interact with them as they are not people, they don't have feelings, they don't really exist, they are only bits of code written for the sole purpose of their relationship to you. 

In multi-player gaming their are other actual people involved. You share the digital world with other real people, player characters, PC's. PC's are also represented digitally, but behind the graphics is an actual person with feelings and desires. They may look exactly like a NPC, but the morality of it seems different. The fact that another real soul is involved makes the interactions more meaningful and interesting as well as less predictable. They are more real. 

As the young man and I talked, we agreed that we often find ourselves playing the game of life as if it is a single player game. We ascribe value to people based on their usefulness to ourselves. We interact with people around us as if they were NPC's performing functions, poplulating our world, but not as real souls. As I have continued to reflect on this, I have realized the strength of my natural tendency to go through my life as if it really were my life, my personal domain, as if others exist only in reference to me. 

The fact is that we live in a multi-player world. We are surrounded not with NPC's but with real people, real souls with their own stories. They are not minor players in our own story, but each person is a lead player in the story that God is writing in and through all our lives. We reduce people to stereotypes and two dimensional sprites and in doing so we treat them as something less than a real person. This depersonalization fundamentally fails to recognize the image of God in each person around us. 

There is something comfortable about a single player game. The rules are more simple and easier to understand. Once you figure out the predictable patterns, you can manipulate the world and master it, control it. Real people are wild cards. They can not be easily manipulated or controlled. No matter how well you understand them, they remain free-agents, unpredictable. They do the unexpected and can wreak havoc on your carefully constructed world. I understand the allure of single player games and enjoy them, but God did not design us, or the world, for single player gaming. He designed us for community and relationship with Him and with others.

We must shake ourselves out of this "single player" mentality! We must choose to live in the real world and recognize the multi-player nature of the world around us. It is a question of perception. We must choose to renew our minds day by day, to recognize the souls around us, across the kitchen table and across the checkout counter. In doing so, we open ourselves up to rich and meaningful interactions with them and with the One who created us all for life with Him and with one another. When we do this, we begin to enter into the real world, to live the eternal kind of life, the abundant life. The Kingdom of God really is within you.