Genesis 2 recounts how humans are made for relationships. After God made Adam, He declared that “it is not good for man to be alone,” and so He made Eve. Aristotle puts it a different way when he says that “human beings are by nature political animals.” Here, “political” just means that we are social creatures with the ability to reason and communicate. Being in relationship with one another is fundamental to what it means to be human.
But, as we discussed last week, relationships can often break down and conflict will arise. This month, we want to take a step back and look at why we need relationships and how to navigate them effectively.
Build Each Other Up
The first reason why we need relationships is that through them we build each other up. How many times, when you’ve had a bad day, has a friend said something encouraging that just totally turned it around? Being in relationship with others means that you can lift each other up when we’re feeling down.
Of course, the opposite is also true: that people can also tear each other down. But we shouldn’t let the possibility of a negative side effect of relationships keep us away from them all together.
Cover Each Others’ Weaknesses
On a similar note, when you have others around, you can cover each other’s weaknesses and fill in the gaps. We were not meant to be able to complete everything on our own. It’s important to have people with different strengths and weaknesses so that you can work together and use your collective strengths to the benefit of the whole.
Having a different perspective around means that your colleague might catch something that you don’t. Or they have a different knowledge set from you that you can learn from. Just because someone does something differently than you doesn’t mean that they’re doing it wrong. And it can be helpful to learn from others’ processes and gain insight into their perspective!
A Common Goal
When you have multiple people working together towards a common There, which is what we define an organization as, you are spurred along towards that goal by the others in the organization. It’s easy to lose motivation when trying to reach a goal by yourself. But working with others means that you can be inspired by their work and get the momentum to keep going. A common There gives you something outside of yourselves to work towards and provides meaning for the work.
I hope you can see that there are many plus sides to being in community with others and why we need relationships in order to thrive. Next time, we will explore how to best nurture these relationships.
Gracie McBride is the Content and Systems Development Coordinator at The Crossroad.
