Relationship Reset Button

Last night at church Pastor Jane was doing a recap of last week’s conference.  I always enjoy those because despite the fact that I worked the conference I didn’t necessarily get to devote my undivided attention to what the speakers were saying.  But this isn’t a blog about what happened at last week’s conference.  It’s merely that a statement she made prompted a thought.. and that is the focus of this blog.


She mentioned how fortunate she and Pastor Tom are to have worked with the same leadership for such a long time.  Some of them have been working together for 20 years.  Over the years they have all grown and matured together and she said, “We have to remember to reset our view of each other so that we see them how God sees them.”  It reminded me of something that I’ve heard Rebecca say, “Sometimes you have to hit the refresh button on relationships so you stay up to date.”  

One of my Youth Pastors used to say, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”  Now back in the day I thought that meant you shouldn’t get close or have personal relationships with leadership because your familiarity with them would damage the relationship.  However, now I see it somewhat differently.  I think being familiar with anyone can cause us to let down our standard of respect, but I also believe it can cause us to get stuck viewing that individual the same way even when they have changed.  For instance I think this happens with parents and children.  I know it happened with my Mom and me.  It took her a long time to realize that I was an adult, perfectly capable of making my own decisions and that she could no longer tell me what to do.  At some point she had to refresh her perspective of me and of our relationship.

It’s like being on CNN’s website checking out the latest news.  If you open the site, read the headlines, but never refresh the page you’re going to miss some new information.  For instance, if you had gone cnn.com the day of the Japan quake and tsunami and read that Hawaii and the West Coast were under tsunami warnings, but didn’t ever refresh and get an update you may have thought all sorts of things.  You may have assumed Hawaii was gone and marked it off your bucket list, and you may have decided all the rumors of California someday falling into the sea had finally come true.  However, by simply refreshing your browser you would have found the most recent news and known that Hawaii suffered minimal damage in comparison and that California merely had some high surf.

It also reminds me of an issue we sometimes have with our website here at the ministry.  On the home page is a rotating banner.  This banner and I are frenemies!  Some days it is my BFF others it is the bane of my existence.  There are cycles when I am updating it frequently adding new events or breaking news.  It’s often these times that it decides to be temperamental.  I’ll save you the technical details of the situation and just say this - inevitably at some point I will make a change, but despite refreshing my browser the change is not reflected on the homepage.  After one VERY FRUSTRATING day of this experience I learned something.  Sometimes refreshing the browser isn’t enough because it gets stuck on the old information.  Instead I need to clear the cache!

People and relationships of all kinds are ever growing and changing.  If you only take in the first piece of information and never refresh you will be disillusioned.  At the same time, if you allow familiarity to set in without refreshing the browser, or clearing the cache, you may never recognize that change has taken place.  

I can be as guilty of forgetting to refresh my relational browser as anyone else.  But I’ve found when I do I’m usually pleasantly surprised to realize that who I thought someone was is not who they really are at all.  I have been unpleasantly surprised to discover the opposite, or found that refreshing didn’t work because the person didn’t change, but for the most part I find myself pleasantly surprised.  

There is an interesting flip side to this as well.  While I’m mostly talking about the positive of hitting the refresh button, there is something else that can happen.  Rather than refreshing and finding something new and exciting you may refresh to find that things are not what they used to be.  One of the speakers at the conference last week warned against falling back into comfortable things.  Sometimes we refuse to refresh and clear the cache because we don’t want to face the reality that things are not the same any more.  The relationship has changed.  The bond is shifting.  The connection has shifted, or maybe it’s gone altogether.