The beautiful photo...

...yes, is the view down the road to the lake near our place. Taken in Autumn. Isn't it gorgeous?

Candles

We got out some candles and wine glasses for our wedding anniversary earlier this month and the children loved it! They stayed at the table longer and we really had a fun mealtime. We've pulled them out a few more times since. It's a great incentive for the reluctant middle child to come to dinner and actually eat and we all have fun blowing them out afterwards.

Sausage rolls

This is to give the impression that I'm a better cook than I really am. I made an effort and pulled out the festering packet of puff pastry and the pork mince that was nearly going off in the freezer. They turned out pretty well thanks to Donna Hay's recipe. Too bad I don't like pork!

Moving III - being new means giving up your past

Starting as a 'newie' is easier when you join something where everyone else is also new. It might be uni, college, or being in the new cast of a play in a drama group. Everyone else is in the same boat, and it’s like a bit of a fresh start.

But where people already have history together, you have to accept that you are the one who will have to fit in with them. How is this possible? I think through humility, by having a ‘learner’ attitude and to a certain extent, giving up your past and its importance in your life.

Michelle and her husband moved to the city so that he could train in ministry. They moved away from all their friends and family and Michelle particularly felt the loss of her best friends. She tried to keep up with them as much as possible by phone and by making the hour-long trip home whenever she could. She put in a lot of effort to keep their friendships going.

However she began to notice a distance in her relationship with her friend. They would hold a party and not invite Michelle and her husband. They asked other people to be godparents to their new babies. Michelle felt sad and rejected. She put a lot of energy into a long-distance relationship but could see it falling apart despite her best efforts.

Michelle began to spend more time with the people around her to meet her needs for friendship and relationships. Over time she realized that her original friendships would have to be given up to a certain extent, and new friendships embraced if she was going to stay happy and connected to the present life.

Michele discovered that to survive the future, you’ve got to give up your past in many ways, and start living in the present as much as possible.

This is where saying goodbye effectively comes in. If we have not said goodbye, and we are still living in the past, things going to be much harder.

Of course living in the present is not easy. It can make you feel core-less, root-less and like a pretender, while you go through time, building history and internalising it with others. But the bad feelings don't last, especially if you can understand the reasons why you feel that way.

Don’t just suppress your past. Allow your past to be grieved. Enjoy it with some others as often as you can but don’t continue to live there. You need to say goodbye to the old so you have room for the new. If you’re trying to hold on to the old tightly with both hands, you’ll stay there. You can’t grow into the future.

Do all your experiences have to go out the window? Do you ever get to talk about what you’ve experienced? Yes, sometimes, but not all the time.

People here and now resent always being compared to the former situation.
When we go on about our previous experiences, it can give the impression that the person we’re talking to is not important.

I met an American exchange student at University who was really nice, and I wanted to get to know her but she had the habit of talking about “All my really good friends back home in Virginia.” In the end it was irritating. I thought, "well – if you like them so much, go back to them.”

Settling in well depends on you doing your part and the people around you being friendly. Sometimes this works really well. James joined a church at the beginning of the year and by March he seemed like part of the furniture. He had a naturally friendly personality, he went to everything and he was lucky enough to come into a group which welcomed and wanted him.

Sometimes this just will not happen. Kerry and her husband joined a new church and looked for a Bible study group. They were put in a group with other young couples like themselves but everyone in the group had been friends together for at least 10 years. While they were polite, they were not interested in being close. After persisting for several years, Kerry and her husband found a new group.

Sometimes it's impossible to try to penetrate a group of close friends. It's better to give them up and look around for other people who are feeling on the edge like yourself. There is always someone else who is looking for a friend.

Finished

I finally finished a quilt/comforter I started more than two years ago for my daughter! My shoulder is not up to quilting, so I just tied it and used the machine to put the binding on. It's made out of of old table clothes, serviettes and scrappy bits. I love being frugal!

What if someone is clinging to you?

A little bit more from my book on friendship...

Perhaps you are very charismatic person with heaps of charm. You are the popular girl that everyone wants to be friends with. If this is you, you probably have a number of people who hang off you for various reasons.

This puts you in a powerful position. With a word or look, you can ruin somebody's day, week or year. Please be careful. The temptation to be cruel can be overwhelming, especially if there are others standing around who will laugh.

You will need to make decisions about how you relate to people around you. Choosing kindness over cruelty does not mean that you have to be everybody's best friend. You can pull back but in a gentle way.

Perhaps, rather than being charismatic, you are capable. You know just what to do and when to do it and how to do it. You have your life in order and you have plenty of compassion for others who don't. You want to serve and you want to help people. Conveniently there always seem to be a lot of people around to help -- people who seem to need you and who cant get on without you. They cling like limpets to a rock and you feel responsible.

This is probably not a healthy relationship. As much as it feels good to help people, if you live their lives for them, you are doing them a disservice. You have a responsibility to live your own life first. Everyone else also has that responsibility. By taking on others and helping too much you are robbing people of the opportunities to grow up and be adults.

Of course, there are exceptions. But if someone needs so much help that you do nothing else but help them, they really should be seeing a professional or someone who is more equipped to help them solve their problems.

If you are neither charismatic or capable but someone is still clinging tightly to you you may need some help in analyzing the situation. Perhaps you are being used or controlled because you are not strong enough to stand up to the other person. It is worth getting some help or talking to someone about it.

Moving II

Once the goodbyes are over, the hellos can begin.

Making new networks -- public, social, personal and intimate -- is important and can be daunting. If connections come through sharing experiences with people, how do we get those shared experiences?

Anyone who is new will face the challenge of fitting in. There is no magic solution. The answers are only found in time, initiative and humility.

Susanna moved from Africa back to her parents’ city in her home country and felt very overwhelmed.

She wrote: “Very quickly I learned that in order to meet people, make new friends and learn the ropes, I had to initiate the conversation. The other kids were not interested in me, nor did they have a desire to understand the places I had been and the things I had seen. In order to fit in, I felt I had to talk about the things and places with which they were familiar. In essence, I had to be like them.

Sounds like the beginning of a miserable year, right? It actually ended up being not so bad. I got involved in small groups at school. The first week I tried out for the swim team and because I could swim well from my years in Africa, I became captain of the team. I also joined the choir. I spent time in both these groups getting to know kids that I had things in common with. I ate lunch with these people, sat in class and rode the bus with them.”

Susanna had to work hard to make common experiences to share with others. She had to get out there and spend time with people She took the initiative to get herself to groups and take part. And she had to be persistent. The bonds would not have been formed in the first week or even the first month.

It is easier when you join something where everyone else is also new. It might be uni, college, or being in the new cast of a play in a drama group. Everyone else is in the same boat, and it’s like a bit of a fresh start.

But where people already have history together, you have to accept that you are the one who will have to fit in with them. How is this possible? I think through humility, by having a ‘learner’ attitude and to a certain extent, giving up your past and its importance in your life.

Michelle and her husband moved to the city so that he could train in ministry. They moved away from all their friends and family and Michelle particularly felt the loss of her best friends. She tried to keep up with them as much as possible by phone and by making the hour-long trip home whenever she could. She put in a lot of effort to keep their friendships going.

However she began to notice a distance in her relationship with her friend. They would hold a party and not invite Michelle and her husband. They asked other people to be godparents to their new babies. Michelle felt sad and rejected. She put a lot of energy into a long-distance relationship but could see it falling apart despite her best efforts.

Michelle began to spend more time with the people around her to meet her needs for friendship and relationships. Over time she realized that her original friendships would have to be given up to a certain extent, and new friendships embraced if she was going to stay happy and connected to the present life.

Michele discovered that to survive the future, you’ve got to give up your past in many ways, and start living in the present as much as possible.
This is where saying goodbye effectively comes in. If we have not said goodbye, and we are still living in the past, things going to be much harder.

Moving

My younger brother has a moving bug. Up until the edge of 33 he could count a different house for every year of his life. That's 33 beds in 33 years. Shifting back and forth from different towns and cities in different countries will do that for you. He loves it. And he starts to feel weird when he's stable enough to buy a fridge.

I'm the opposite. Moving makes me feel weird. I'm still not used to it, even after doing it in a big way at least 16 times in my life! I get nerves and jitters. I get stressed, angry and jumpy when I meet people for the first time. I come home tired and worn out after only two hours in new company.

My brother feels exhilarated, cosmopolitan and challenged by moving around. He enjoys the differences and the feeling of belonging nowhere but everywhere. I feel disrupted, unrooted and cranky when I move.
Wherever you are on the spectrum between me and my brother, moving takes energy and know-how to do it well.

There are two parts to moving, saying goodbye and saying hello.

Personally I'm terrible at saying goodbye. My usual technique is to get stressed packing up and to put all my energy into the physical details of moving. I pretend I'm not going to miss people and say only quick perfunctory goodbyes. Unfortunately, I get to the new situation and feel terribly depressed for the next six months and then spend a lot of money on counseling!!

A friend of mine* does it much better. Her process takes time and thought and starts at least two weeks before she leaves anywhere!

First of all she thinks about it. What groups did she find a sense of belonging in while in this place? Next she lists the individuals who were close to her or him she would personally like to encourage before she leaves. She then finds ways to tell them how much she appreciated that care and enjoyed their friendship. She sends cards, notes, photos or gifts or just takes them out for coffee.

The next step is to keep a database and get her friends contact details. She also gives friends a chance to give her a farewell message too -- by writing on a T-shirt, a Teddy bear or in a notebook. Then she grabbed the camera and takes pictures of the special people and places she loves.

Saying goodbye can be emotional. She gives hugs and sometimes will cry. Finally she remembers that goodbye is short for "God be with you". She prays and commits her friends lives to God.

Once the goodbyes are over, the hellos can begin.

*Thanks Kat!

Photos

If you're interested in some of our recent holiday snaps, click here.

13 years today!

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this is my baby boy

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growing up!

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can't bottle this smile

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The four spaces

In answer to Sophie's question from my last post, here is a brief explanation of the 'four spaces of relationship' as described by E.T. Hall in the 1960s.


A trap that many people fall into is thinking that only close relationships matter and have value. Their aim is to get more and more close relationships, or take what close relationships they do have to even deeper levels.

But the reality is that there are many ways to be in relationships with others. And all of them have value. Here’s a slightly different framework to help us think about this.

The four spaces of belonging were recently described by Joe Myers in his book 'Search to Belong' as an observation tool to help us think about our relationships.

He says there are four ‘spaces’ of belonging in life – Public, Social, Personal and Intimate.

Public belonging occurs when people connect through an outside influence.
Public belonging might happen if you support a sports team, or if you’re the member of a club or organisation.

Public ‘spaces’ include churches, schools, physical places, jobs, universities, after school groups. Public space relationships are not trivial relationships. To a large extent these define our lives. Our public spaces give us broad brush strokes of identity. They are the things we use when we introduce ourselves. They provide the information other people need to see where we fit in society.

Social space
The people who we know by face or name and who we might greet personally belong in our social space. These could be people we study or work with. We can find social belonging in fellowship groups and family get-togethers, at camps, church or school, or even on the bus! Any place where you make small talk is a social space.

You might call these people ‘acquaintances’ if you’re being old fashioned and polite. You don’t have to like everyone in this space. And to be honest, unless you’re a starry-eyed optimist through and through, you will never like everyone in this space.

But these relationships are still really important. This is the space where ‘neighbour’ relationships come into play. Social space is also a ‘sorting’ space for those people who you want to get to know better and invite into your ‘personal space’. In social space conversations, we tend to present ourselves in the best possible way.

Personal space
‘Friend’ is the word we usually use for people who fit into our personal space. Personal space is where we share much more private (but not super-intimate) experiences, feelings, and thoughts. The people in our personal space know more about us than people in our social space. We are able to be more honest with them, and sometimes show them the sides of ourselves that are not quite so socially presentable. However, we don’t share inappropriately so as to make them (or us) feel uncomfortable.

Intimate space
Intimate space is reserved for the people you are extremely close to, physically and emotionally. In our culture, the physical space of intimacy is from 0 to about 18 inches. If you’re intimate, you get up close in all ways!
Intimate space is where you share your most personal experiences, feelings and thoughts. This is where you become truly vulnerable with another person.

Who fits into this space? It all depends on your circumstances. The most obvious answer is your spouse – if you’re married. Apart from that, intimate space can be filled by parents, children, other relatives, romantic partners or very close friends.

There is often a commitment of some sort involved in intimate space relationships. It might be a spoken commitment, in the case of marriage vows, or an unspoken commitment, in the case of children and parents.