Relationships and their Seasons

Along the expanse of life, inevitably there are many relationships that come into our lives, some for a reason, some for a season, and some for an entire lifetime.

Over a lifetime, we can chart the progress of our relationships, and indeed we can see how some relationships endured, while others didn’t, and we can also see how many of these relationships required maintenance along the way.

Often relationships require the tending of trust and respect, and of responding in kindness and grace, notwithstanding the necessary input of boundaries.  Boundaries are an ever-present need in many of our relationships.

Some relationships feature seasons of stress and strain, and some of these simply don’t endure, because boundaries were rejected out of hand, or there was some unmanageable impasse.  Many relationships are broken through a single conflict, but there is usually a basis of unreconciled differences beneath the presenting issue.  Some of these we learn a great deal from, through pain and through bitter experience.

There is the right of self-protection in our relationships.  It’s the sanctity of freedom in life that we ought to relate with those we feel safe with.

Other relationships bear the burden of our weaker contributions, and perhaps we are the benefactors of the grace of others more often than we would like to admit.  Sometimes it is us who is forgiven.  What’s due us in these situations is our reciprocation of gratitude.  And sometimes our faults and failures become the reason relationships fail.  It’s hoped we’re humble enough to learn.  It’s what we expect of others, so we need to have the integrity to live what we value.

At other times, in certain relationships, we are asked or required to bear the burden of others’ misdeeds.  It is us that gives the grace of forgiveness, maybe when it’s undeserved of the other person, and it is hoped that they appreciate our gift of grace. In all our lives, there will be times in relationships where that grace was received gratefully, just as there will be times when our grace is thrown back in our face.  We can only give what we can give, and it’s not on us if it won’t be received.

There are times, too, when we’re devastated by what was done to us, usually by another or others who have zero contrition—all this teaches us the nature of some people.

Just as there are times where people go cold and ambivalently lose interest in those of us they once sought out or invested in.  Such is life.

As we look back on decades of relationship experience, we might chart a certain relationship or three where we were close at certain points, about as intimate as any relationship might get, yet there might have been long seasons of distance between.  Upon these relationships our wisdom grows and reaches to the heights of gratitude for the grace that held us and them kindly in its hand.

The most interesting part of life is that we can never really tell the future and what it holds. One of the most useful exercises I find is walking through my favourite cemetery in Fremantle.  Just being around all those graves helps me put my life in perspective, and how my life is interdependent upon all the relationships that I’ve ever had, have, and will ever have.

It was during one of these recent walks that I imagined all our relationships have their seasons, and wisdom dictates that it is good to trust upon a positive hope for those strained relationships we bear right now.  Relationships can certainly produce much agony and anguish.

None of us knows the future, and perhaps this is the best gift of all, because we never know what relationships we have needed to say goodbye to that may emerge as reconciled in the final analysis.

Just the same, we are given to the obligation to accept those relationship outcomes that we cannot change.  In some situations, people came into our lives for a reason or for a season or for a lifetime, yet they either didn’t stay, or we couldn’t stay.  Or perhaps they did stay and we’re either grateful or regretful.

For those situations that we would’ve liked to have had differently, we have the opportunity of a cauterised acceptance.

This is never easy, of course, but it is part of the task of wisdom, to discern what to let go and to intrepidly step out that journey.

It is a peace granted to us when we can appreciate that relationships have their seasons.  That is to accept the things we cannot change, as well as be grateful for the relationships that are or were a blessing to us, and where we were or are a blessing to others.