Joe Campbell, a member of 1st Holywood congregation and PCI’s Conciliation Panel, reflects on the need to handle our relationships with one another with care amid the ongoing stresses and strains of living with the impact of the pandemic.   

Handle with Care                          

As I grow older I find that among the greatest gifts I have to give is my love of life, my inner peace and my awareness of God in the ordinariness of life. As I look back over recent years the people who have helped me most are those who have shared themselves, the deeper challenges and opportunities in their own lives. This sense of shared pilgrimage is such a lovely gift to give and receive.

In talking with others it’s always a great sadness to me when someone speaks of fractured relationships with their adult children or an unsolved dispute with a sister, brother or once good friend. Certainly growing older convinces me that life is too short to harbour grudges or nurse old wounds. It does really hurt when those we are estranged from are in the congregation, those we not only worshipped with but shared prayer with and once perhaps called brother or sister in the faith. Experience has taught me that I need people who are different, who challenge and even disagree with me. Those diverse voices act like a refiner’s fire when I realise that my way of seeing life is my way. Other good people have a different and equally valued perspective. 

Relationships lost in communication

The massive disruption to our lives that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought, and especially to congregational life, has aggravated many relationships that were before its intervention perhaps fragile anyway. Discussions on Zoom, quite apart from the struggle with technology and often because of it, have brought further irritation to those relationships. The pandemic, the very thing that should have unified us in support and encouragement of one another through tough times, has been for some the very thing that has levered us apart. Differences in how we understand safety of one another and how and when organisations begin their programmes are discussions we have never had to have before. I know when I draw the line on safety, respecting others space and distance I am always on the “right side” of it, others on the wrong! 

This all points to how we communicate with one another and when there is tension around then text messages, emails and phone calls are a very second best to discussing face to face. Certainly it’s always difficult to repair a relationship, but how much more so when stresses, tensions and ill-chosen words are written and stored on phones and social media for well, perhaps, all time?  

Living with a limp in relationship

Some of my most humbling experiences have been to sit with someone who has been deeply hurt by someone close, a family member, a neighbour or a friend in the congregation. Sometimes anger is  close to the surface, tears are very real. But perhaps the emotion I detect most is death, a deadness and coldness, mainly because the fracture happened so long ago, and that brokenness has been left as a way of dealing with it. So that when a family event comes around, a wedding, funeral or Christmas, eyes hardly meet, there is a silence and the gaping distance between is very real. 

Far too many of us settle for living with the deadness, limping on, rather than moving towards resolution and reconciliation. The result of limping on - ask someone with a bad hip - has a nasty habit of affecting other aspects of our lives and bodies, sleepless nights, headaches, and more than occasional temper tantrums. 

Giving the gift of restored relationship

I wish our congregations taught us more about forgiveness. I’m glad we have a lot of great sermons and books on how God forgives us through the cross, that’s critical. But I am thinking more of our responsibility and obligation to forgive one another even when frankly we think people have behaved so badly they don’t deserve it or often don’t even want it, and when there seems absolutely nothing in it for us. 

Jesus invites us to pray for enemies. Usually we pray that the other person will change, and usually over time they do. But I understand Jesus to mean also to pray about my attitude towards them, asking for grace and strength every day to love more and more. Any study of the life of Jesus would surely show this was one of his core messages demonstrated in both word and deed. From my own long experience, we cannot do it without him. It is a truly “spiritual experience” when two people or two groups of people decide to put aside old hurts and animosities and fan the flames of a new relationship. For sure this is not a one-time decision but the beginning of a focused journey towards what we have come to call reconciliation. That journey is made with Jesus by our side, prompting, guiding, and leading. The Word after all was made flesh and is living among us and in us by the Holy Spirit. Forgiveness is a wonderful gift to receive and what a relief it brings, it’s also a wonderful gift to give to someone, family member, adult, child or member of the congregation. 

So, especially in these times of increased physical distancing and heightened stresses and strains on our interactions, let’s handle with care and, where necessary, do what we can to gently mend the fabric of our relationships with others where they have become frayed.   

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