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This week we will talk about honoring God in our relationships with our friends.
Here are a few things that may get your mental wheels turning this week:
1. Who is your best friend(s)? What makes them so great?
2. Think of someone that became your friend very quickly. What about them allowed that to happen? What about you helped that process?
3. What do you think it means to be a good friend?
4. What sort of things hurt friendships? I'm sure we've all had friendships that have soured - why? What happened?
5. How can God use our friendships? How can he use our friends in our lives and how can he use us in our friends' lives?
Hopefully that is enough to get you thinking. I guess we'll see on Sunday!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Family
This past week we talked about how we relate to our families. We covered a whole bunch of ground and did so way too quickly. So first of all, apologies to those who wanted to share but were unable to due to us having to move along. But that is the purpose of this blog - for us to share the things that we didn't or were unable to on Sunday.
Second, I realized after the fact (thanks in part to a discussion with Alida) that our relationships with our parents (or guardian figures) and our siblings are very different from one another and that we did a disservice to both by squishing them together. So since we couldn't cover all the ground we wanted to and since we dealt primarily with two kinds of very different relationships, a few questions/comments remain.
1. How does power play into our relationship with our parents? What happens when that power that our parents have over us lessens as we get older?
2. We didn't get to talk about the middle/oldest/youngest dynamic with regard to siblings and parents. How does birth order affect our relationship with our siblings and our parents? How did you view your siblings in reference to birth order?
3. What about the few that may be only children - what is that dynamic like? Is leaving the nest harder for only children than for others?
4. This is the most important question that we left undone: How much sway should your family hold over you as an adult? How much is too much and how much is too little? How can you tell?
5. A few people noted that we didn't talk about relating to family members who don't believe in the Lord. I purposefully left that issue to one side since I plan on speaking about it in a future lesson.
So what do you think about these questions/comments? Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Second, I realized after the fact (thanks in part to a discussion with Alida) that our relationships with our parents (or guardian figures) and our siblings are very different from one another and that we did a disservice to both by squishing them together. So since we couldn't cover all the ground we wanted to and since we dealt primarily with two kinds of very different relationships, a few questions/comments remain.
1. How does power play into our relationship with our parents? What happens when that power that our parents have over us lessens as we get older?
2. We didn't get to talk about the middle/oldest/youngest dynamic with regard to siblings and parents. How does birth order affect our relationship with our siblings and our parents? How did you view your siblings in reference to birth order?
3. What about the few that may be only children - what is that dynamic like? Is leaving the nest harder for only children than for others?
4. This is the most important question that we left undone: How much sway should your family hold over you as an adult? How much is too much and how much is too little? How can you tell?
5. A few people noted that we didn't talk about relating to family members who don't believe in the Lord. I purposefully left that issue to one side since I plan on speaking about it in a future lesson.
So what do you think about these questions/comments? Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Co-Workers and Family
Hey guys and gals,
Last week we talked about honoring God in our relationships at work. In class it was mentioned that not everyone is equally valuable, specifically that some people do and say things that are not of value. What should we do then? Well I think a starting place might be that everyone is valuable in a certain respect, namely that they are a person. God created them and made them in his image, even if they are distorting that image with their actions and words. However, we don't have to value the things that people do. I want to get at this problem from a different angle though and to do so I have to ask a question: How do we value people as human beings when we don't value their words and actions?
So far we have talked about strangers and then about co-workers. My intention was to continue each week by discussing a more intimate relationship than the last. This week I was stuck with a bit of a conundrum - should we talk about our relationship with our friends or our families? One person may be closer to their friends than their family and the next person vice versa. So I flipped a coin and family won. Therefore this week we will discuss honoring God in our families. I want to explore honoring our parents as adults (what about dishonorable parents?), our relationships with our siblings (if we have them), the patterns in which we are often stuck in our families, etc. So be thinking about your relationships to your family members. How can you honor God in those relationships?
Last week we talked about honoring God in our relationships at work. In class it was mentioned that not everyone is equally valuable, specifically that some people do and say things that are not of value. What should we do then? Well I think a starting place might be that everyone is valuable in a certain respect, namely that they are a person. God created them and made them in his image, even if they are distorting that image with their actions and words. However, we don't have to value the things that people do. I want to get at this problem from a different angle though and to do so I have to ask a question: How do we value people as human beings when we don't value their words and actions?
So far we have talked about strangers and then about co-workers. My intention was to continue each week by discussing a more intimate relationship than the last. This week I was stuck with a bit of a conundrum - should we talk about our relationship with our friends or our families? One person may be closer to their friends than their family and the next person vice versa. So I flipped a coin and family won. Therefore this week we will discuss honoring God in our families. I want to explore honoring our parents as adults (what about dishonorable parents?), our relationships with our siblings (if we have them), the patterns in which we are often stuck in our families, etc. So be thinking about your relationships to your family members. How can you honor God in those relationships?
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Hospitality
Last week in Crossroads we talked about our relationships with strangers or people whom we don't know very well. A major part of our discussion focused on the notion of hospitality, so I wanted to clarify what exactly I meant during class.
Often in today's Church when we think of hospitality we think of people, usually women, who like and are good at hosting events, providing food for Church activities, etc. These things are part of being hospitable, but they do not exhaust all of what it means to exhibit hospitality.
Two quick things: 1) Every Christian is called to be hospitable. "Hospitality" does not appear in any of the lists of spiritual gifts (Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4) and all Christians are commanded to practice hospitality (Romans 12.13). I only say this because I fear that some of us, myself included, try to get out of things by saying "I'm not gifted that way." Well, we certainly can't say that about hospitality - it is not considered a spiritual gift in the New Testament and we are all commanded to be hospitable. We are not off the hook! 2) The word for hospitality in the New Testament is philoxenia, which is a combination of of two Greek root words - philos and xenos. Philos means love (as in Philadelphia - city of brotherly love) and xenos means strangers or others (as in xenophobia - fear of others). In other words, we are to have love for others around us. Let me be clear that Scripture teaches that this does not just apply to those whom we host at our homes or at a party or for whom we provide food at Church. No, we are instructed to love others, all of them, no matter where or when. That is a challenging message if I ever heard one!
This next week we'll be talking about our relationships at work and/or school. So it is my hope that you'll spend some time thinking about how these sorts of relationships faired for you this week. Were there any tensions? Were there some opportunities in which you honored God? Please be prepared to share as you feel comfortable.
I look forward to seeing all of you Sunday morning at 9:15!
Often in today's Church when we think of hospitality we think of people, usually women, who like and are good at hosting events, providing food for Church activities, etc. These things are part of being hospitable, but they do not exhaust all of what it means to exhibit hospitality.
Two quick things: 1) Every Christian is called to be hospitable. "Hospitality" does not appear in any of the lists of spiritual gifts (Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4) and all Christians are commanded to practice hospitality (Romans 12.13). I only say this because I fear that some of us, myself included, try to get out of things by saying "I'm not gifted that way." Well, we certainly can't say that about hospitality - it is not considered a spiritual gift in the New Testament and we are all commanded to be hospitable. We are not off the hook! 2) The word for hospitality in the New Testament is philoxenia, which is a combination of of two Greek root words - philos and xenos. Philos means love (as in Philadelphia - city of brotherly love) and xenos means strangers or others (as in xenophobia - fear of others). In other words, we are to have love for others around us. Let me be clear that Scripture teaches that this does not just apply to those whom we host at our homes or at a party or for whom we provide food at Church. No, we are instructed to love others, all of them, no matter where or when. That is a challenging message if I ever heard one!
This next week we'll be talking about our relationships at work and/or school. So it is my hope that you'll spend some time thinking about how these sorts of relationships faired for you this week. Were there any tensions? Were there some opportunities in which you honored God? Please be prepared to share as you feel comfortable.
I look forward to seeing all of you Sunday morning at 9:15!
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