An idle odd personal blog entry. It was Venn's anniversary, and I was thinking about family and friends, and hence the play on words "Venn family and friends ..." (and no, I'm not German). I have family, relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers, and people who irritate me. There's overlap: family who irritate, friends who are colleagues, friends who are family, acquaintances who are relatives, etc. You know how it works. As the saying goes, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family, and perhaps that's just as well. However, I was also thinking about how friends are equals, but families are hierarchies. Parents, grand parents, siblings nieces and nephews; so often the hierarchy twists the relationship. Of course there's good hierarchy (respect your elders etc.). There's also bad hierarchy -- when it's used to abuse. Then there's also the subtle hierarchy among siblings; eldest, youngest, middle child. My experience is that siblings really, really struggle to comprehend what it is to walk in the shoes of their younger or older brother/sister. And that means it's all the harder to break out of the implicit hierarchy, with commensurate tensions that persist into old age when there should be mutual friendship. And so, when Paul says "I have become all things to all people", and we take that as a principle of evangelism, perhaps we could also do a lot better at adopting this for our relationships with family (and of course all the other Venn categories).
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
|