Written by Dana-Marie Ramjit, Ph.D. 5 Min Read
Human beings function and flourish on relationships. One of the world’s longest ongoing studies on adult development began in 1938 during the Great Depression. Director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, said in 2015, “good relationships keep us happier and healthier.” On the contrary, keeping yourself out of relationships can be toxic and contribute to a decline in brain functionality, which ultimately leads to short life spans. Here’s another revelation, relationships are also linked to health. Waldinger, who is also a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School says that tending to relationships is a form of self-care that influences longevity. This is great, but how do you maintain solid relationships?
This must be the greatest challenge for the human. We live in an imperfect world, there is pain all around and we ourselves are products of this imperfection. We experience a roller coaster of emotions daily and at varying points in our lives and we are all very different beings who more often than not, clash and collide. This must be an impossible task.
What do people say about relationships?
So how do people say we can build healthy relationships? Well, Ghandi tells us with respect, understanding, acceptance and appreciation, and this sounds pretty reasonable. Oscar Wilde tells us with conversation. Henry Cloud says relationships are maintained by the extent to which people can resolve issues. Henry James believed that the most important ingredient for healthy relationships is kindness. Now we can try all of this, and many of us do, but somehow, we can’t keep it up: we are incapable of always accepting, appreciating, respecting, understanding, and being kind. So most rational thinking people will discover the need for a starting point to apply these strategies. We cross out people themselves because they are sometimes the most difficult part of the process. It simmers down to the fact that inherently, we need to be driven by something bigger than ourselves, better than ourselves and stronger than ourselves to keep the momentum.
What the Bible says about relationships?
But when we look at the Bible’s overview of relationships, we are presented with something new, a different perspective. The message of the Gospel is about Jesus Christ, who came to earth as a human being, died on a cross for the sins of His friends, was raised and reunited with His Father in heaven. The concept is interesting because He constantly talks to His followers about having a relationship with Him, and this hints at possibly the most important characteristic of Jesus, He is relational. How can we arrive at this conclusion? Here are three simple explanations:
1. His Unsolicited Love
Shakespeare said, “love sought is good, but given unsought is better.” The Bible tells us about Jesus that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). This must be the greatest expression of love in all of the world; that one man died sacrificially to pay for the wrong of humanity.
2. Second, His Empathy
The Bible tells in Isaiah 53:3-5, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hid their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Not only is He touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15) but like us, He was pierced and crushed and bears the wounds of His suffering. If there’s someone who understands the greatest physical and emotional pain a human being can encounter, it is Jesus.
3. Third, His invitation
In John 10:27 Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” It seems impossible to follow someone who does not understand our suffering. We identify with people who speak to our greatest needs, who can relate to our experiences and who face similar challenges. The Bible tells us Jesus, bore our griefs, and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4). If I wanted to imitate someone, Jesus would be a perfect example.
How can I make my relationships better?
Now it gets even more interesting as Jesus answers the toughest question that we all encounter about our relationships: how can I make them better? In Matthew 22:37-39 Jesus highlights two of the most important relationships in our lives: your relationship with God and your relationship with your neighbours. He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
So straight away, we know that the most important relationship is our relationship with the Father, and if this one is intact, the second one falls into place: all other interactions with the people around you. Jesus talks about love as a chief element of our relationship with Him and makes the point that it is impossible to build relationships with others if we first do not love God, and this is consistent with the message of the Bible in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.”
Jesus Christ presents the standard of success in building and maintaining healthy relationships and here’s why: He loved people, He understood and empathized with them and finally, He invites them to follow Him. When you follow the example of the life of Jesus, you can build strong and effective connections with the people you love.
