Saturday, November 29, 2014

Listening as Vital for Friendship

It is common in life for people to try to do too much. They will try to be friends with everyone in the church and in the end they are friends with no one in the church.

I am not saying there should be an inhospitable spirit of anyone to anyone else in the church. It is quite frustrating to see Christians who do not wish to include other Christians in conversation or such.

What I am saying is that we cannot have significant relationships with all people. I often find that people who try to have too many friendships begin to have a deep knowledge deficit about their "friends." They cannot really remember the details about their many friends because they have too many friends to count.

Ultimately the friendships are of a kind which are quite trivial and often verge frankly upon having a vast number of acquaintances. Ultimately true friendship takes time.

I believe that true friendship requires listening. And listening takes a great deal of time. We often have a choice between developing many shallow relationships or a few deep relationships.

I believe developing a few deep relationships is usually preferable to many shallow relationships. Of course having deep and shallow relationships are not absolutely opposed, but with limited time often having many shallow relationships will leave no time for deep relationships.

Choices often make other choices untenable. A choice is not wrong in any logical sense because it makes choices untenable; it is simply the nature of life. Often we choose one thing at the expense of another.

The issue of course is when we try as we often do to choose too many things. Often when we choose too many things all of our choices suffer or we suffer because of our choices.

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