Richer Relationships

The people in your life were entrusted to you. Your family, your church, your friends, your coworkers, and your neighbors are all part of what the Lord has placed in your charge, and he is looking for a return on those relationships just as surely as he is looking for one on your money.

Last time we considered your money and the return the Lord expects on it. The people in your life belong in the same account, and the return the Lord looks for on them is fruit. That fruit grows only among people.

The fifth commandment is wider than you think

We tend to hear “Honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12) and think of small children minding their parents. The Westminster Larger Catechism, summarizing the teaching of Scripture, reads it more widely. The commandment means “not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (WLC 124). The commandment itself walks us out of the house. The Shorter Catechism then states its scope: the duties belonging to everyone “in their several places and relations, as superiors, inferiors, or equals” (WSC 64).

So every person you know stands in one of three relations to you. Some are over you, some are under your care, and most are alongside you, and each of those relations carries duties that you did not invent and cannot decline.

Three relations, in your week

Start at home. If you are a parent, there are people under your care who did not choose you and cannot leave, and the catechism is specific about what you owe them: “to love, pray for, and bless” them, “to instruct, counsel, and admonish them,” and to provide “all things necessary for soul and body” (WLC 129).

Take it to work, and it is the same three relations in a different place. If anybody reports to you, every duty in that answer applies to you at the office as surely as it applies at home. I would guess that most Christians who manage people haven’t considered that the fifth commandment governs the way they treat their direct reports, but it does. At church you may stand in two relations at once. I serve on a session of a Presbyterian church, so I bear an office with authority, and I also stand alongside the rest of the congregation as a brother in Christ.

The third category is the one most people skip. Toward our equals, we are “to rejoice in each other’s gifts and advancement, as their own” (WLC 131), and the catechism counts envy among the sins of equals (WLC 132). Among peers, envy usually shows itself as a quiet inability to be glad when somebody alongside you does well.

And then the neighbor

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29), he wanted a boundary, so he would know when he had done enough. Jesus told him about an injured man in a ditch and a Samaritan who stopped to help. Paul teaches the same lesson: “as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone” (Gal. 6:10).

Put that together, and you are inextricably connected to a network of other human beings, and its edges keep moving as the Lord brings people across your path. These relationships have been entrusted to you, at least for a time. The only question is whether you are handling them with intention.

What does the owner get?

If these relationships are a trust, then the owner expects a return, as the master did in the parable of the talents. With money it is easy to picture. With a person, it resists quantification. What is the return on a marriage, or on a friendship of twenty years, or on the man in the ditch who could never pay you back? I think this is where most of us quietly stop thinking about relationships as stewardship at all. We can’t count the return, so we file our relationships under some other mental category and let them happen to us instead of tending them.

Richer relationships

The return the Lord is looking for is richer relationships, and I mean richer in both senses: the way we say a man is rich, and the way we say a sauce or a dessert is rich, fuller and with more heft.

The increase shows up in two places. It shows up in them. A person you invest time in is built up, and if you are doing it as a Christian should, that person is also encouraged toward greater faithfulness. And it shows up in you, which I think we forget. When I give time to my wife and make myself known to her, I come away with a deeper understanding of her and a deeper awareness of myself. The same is true with my children, and with a friend who has known me for years.

Consider the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). How many of those could you practice alone in a room? You cannot be patient by yourself, and kindness needs someone to receive it. Relationships are the soil in which those things grow, and the Lord uses the people around you to make you into something you could not have become by yourself.

What it costs

The people closest to you are also the easiest trust to assume is fine. I expect a great deal of myself and of other people, so I tend to assume that everyone around me is handling their own business. Unless there is a crisis, I leave them to it. That assumption is usually correct, right up until it isn’t. If you relate to people that way for long enough, the relationship starts to grow more distant, and one day it becomes awkward. I could never tell you exactly when it changed.

Other parts of life don’t work like that. If you have a problem with your money, your money will eventually tell you, and your body will make it very clear when something is wrong with your health. People rarely do. They tend to go quiet, and we take the quiet to mean that everything is fine.

So stewarding people takes cultivating, and cultivating costs something. The only inputs are time, patience, understanding, and a willingness to be known, and I have been learning slowly that you cannot scale a relationship. I meet and talk with hundreds of people in a year because of my work, and for a long time I tried to multiply my effectiveness inside those relationships, the way you might increase your productivity at a task. I don’t think it can be done. There is no passive income from your relationships, and there is only so much time and energy in a day.

Some of you will also pour yourself into people who can never give back, like an infant or a difficult member of your congregation. You should do it anyway. But you need people pouring into you too, because this was never meant to be a one-way street.

Start where the supply is

So where does the energy come from? The biggest relationship any of us has is with the Lord himself, the triune God, and it is cultivated the same way the others are, by spending time in it: in prayer, in meditation on his word, and in worship with his people. There we are poured into by an infinite source of love and understanding, because God himself is infinite, self-sufficient, everlasting, immense, and incomprehensible. He does not run out of gifts to give us, even when he gives us the gift of himself.

So if you are running on empty with the people in your life, go back to the headwaters and begin where the supply is. Start anywhere else, and you will be pouring from an empty tank. You will become sparing with your attention, you will retreat to the few people you cannot avoid, and everyone else will get whatever is left over, which will be nothing. The end of that road is burnout, and it comes from trying to be the source.

I have been using the word cultivate on purpose, because it is an agricultural term. The Lord gives the soil, the seed, and the water, and then he gives the growth, which is the part no farmer has ever managed on his own. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6).

If you want the daily practice that helps me stay oriented on the things that matter, you can get a free pre-publication copy of my book The Compounding Mind by subscribing to the newsletter.

So put in the time, do it for the Lord’s glory, and he will provide the increase. That increase is not necessarily more friends or better business partners, and you will not be able to put a number on it. But you will become spiritually wealthier in your relationships, and richer in the network of people the Lord has entrusted to you.