In this book, “Practicing Right Relationship”, they write the following: “Life-giving relationships happen neither automatically nor magically. They are created by people who make the choice to be open, authentic, caring, and curious about each other.” I am making that choice. You are making that choice. I am making the choice to be caring. I am making the choice to be curious. I am making the choice to be open with other people. They go on to say: “The skills that are required to create and maintain such relationships can be learned. Right relationships are important not only for the fulfillment that they bring each but also for what gets created through them. These relationships are a vehicle through which G-d works and affects change in the world. The stronger and healthier our relationships then the clearer channels they can be for what G-d wants to birth in our life and the world.” Well, amen to that! I believe that G-d wants to birth great things in the world. I believe that truth makes people free. I believe if I can enter into genuine meaningful dialogue about what is true with other people then things will change, and G-d’s will can be done. Now, a person might be thinking the exact same thing I am thinking. I am thinking they do not know the truth, and I do. That person is thinking, “He doesn’t know the truth, but I do.” If I keep that person at arms length while I batter him with doctrine and that person keeps me at arms length while he batters me with doctrine, then we are not going to go very far. Instead, I can genuinely love that person in my heart and not make small talk and not simply open my living room but open my heart. That is what needs to be opened. My perspective has to be different. My internal self-talk about people has to be different. If that person is talking to himself about how valuable I am and is curious about why I believe what I believe, then I can talk to that person and be curious with that person. Now we have a chance of affecting great change in both of us. Maybe, we will come to the point of like-mindedness, and maybe we will not. I will tell you what, even if we do not, we are both in a position to better understand each other. We can better understand that we are in the same fight of trying to find G-d, trying to see G-d when we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians. 13:12), and trying to do our best for G-d’s people. We can bless each other and go back to our own fields of work. Does that make sense? On page nine Sellon and Smith write: “We have discovered as have many others that good relational skills can be learned and honed across time.” Praise G-d because I did not start out with many good relational skills. What a word of comfort that they can be honed and they can be learned. That is great! Practical skills and self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relational management are all needed. Through practice these skills can be built, confidence developed, and right relationships lived. They write at another place: “Right relationship depends on knowing to the best of our ability not only who we are but who the other person is. What makes that difficult is that we often think we already know the other person, his likes and dislikes, his aims and goals, even at times what he is thinking and feeling.” Absolutely, when I read this paragraph it was like, “Duh.” I run into somebody and say, “What church do you go to?” They tell me what church they go to, and then I am exactly like this book says, “I think I already know the other person. I already know what he believes, his values and his goals,” yet I have not even asked him about them. Is it not true that we pigeon hole people and then the internal talk starts? We then wonder why we do not have a close relationship. We wonder why we are not effective as ministers of truth, why we are not effective as Messianic’s, and why we are not effective lovers of people. We have to change our heart. We have to open our heart and change our self-talk. We have to begin to elevate people and understand that doctrine is a vehicle for deliverance, but it is not as important as the person who is being delivered. We have to keep talking about that in our minds until we genuinely believe it. Sellon and Smith go on to say: “As children we were naturally curious, linking observations with the questions, ‘Why?’ Why do you have to go to work? Why does rain fall down? Why does John get that face when Mrs. Adams calls? As we get older, we tend to lose our curiosity. Now, rather than asking why someone makes a face when Mrs. Adams calls, we typically form a hypothesis in our mind and then take that hypothesis as true, and we never check to see if we are correct. In other words, we make up stories.” Is that not exactly what we do? You hear something you have heard before and you run yourself right through the path. Pretty soon, you know the whole story, but when in fact, all we know is that we saw a face. When we know how we are making people feel it is social awareness, but when we know what we are doing, when we feel we are being defensive then that is self-awareness. As you begin to enter into a dialogue with the person, maybe the person is very blessed with the teaching and very confident of his doctrine etc, etc. Maybe by being curious, that person will open his or her life to you, and you will be able to discuss things. Maybe he or she will be very curious about you, and you will start to talk about things, so then the next thing you know, you find out you can be close to each other. Even if you practically realize at the end of the conversation from a person of another denomination, that they are very happy with believing that G-d is totally in control, that the dead are alive, or a bunch of other things that I do not believe Scripture teaches, then I can recognize the practical reality that we would have a hard time ministering together. I can open my heart to that person, and that person can open their heart to me. We can be friends. We can realize that in our own way, we are both fighting as hard as we can to get truth to people to set them free, to obey Messiah, and to be like Messiah. Sellon and Smith go on and talk about questions you can ask so you can enter into right relationships with people. For example: “What do I want my relationship with this person to be like?” I can tell you how to make the relationship cold and distant. If you or I in our self-talk think that the person is not worth anything unless the person believes like we do, then the relationship will be distant. If you or I say in our self-talk that we want our relationship to be meaningful, then we cannot enter into it thinking that the doctrine is more important than the relationship. “What attitudes and values do I want to honor as I am with this person?” “What must I let go of in order to turn toward this person?” “What is the goodness in this person that I will see and trust?” “How will I acknowledge to the person the holy goodness that I see in her or him?” This book, “Practicing Right Relationship” is very good for ideas and ways to enter into relationship with people because people are valuable. There is another book called “In Search of Excellence” by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman. This is a book that was on the New York Time’s best sellers list for over three years, yet the lesson from this book is quite simple. These men went out to find why companies succeeded. Why were some companies very successful and other companies not so successful? They had some simple conclusions. They write here in their introduction: “More over to our initial surprise, the content of the culture [corporate culture] was invariably limited to just a handful of themes. Whether bending tin, frying hamburgers, or providing rooms for rent, virtually all the excellent companies had it, they defined themselves as de facto service businesses, — the customer reigns supreme!” What are they saying here? They are simply saying when they surveyed companies and found out what made a company successful, they found out that the customer reigns supreme. The customer was the thing that was important, not what they were doing, not their production line, and not their management techniques. The customer was important, and the customer felt that. Because the customer felt important, the customer then patronized the company. That is how our relationships work. We need to make people feel important, which you do when you open your heart and enter into friendship with them. If I open my heart and make somebody a friend and ask them questions about themselves and make them feel important, do they not know that? Sure, they know that. You feel it when somebody makes you important. Sure you do. I do. We feel it! I also know when I am being patronized. I feel that too. Absolutely, I do. I was in a computer store the other day, and a guy was behind the counter. The guy was messing around with some kind of thing that he was doing. I stood there. Whatever he was doing must have been more important than me because he sat there and fiddled and messed and fiddled and messed, and I stood there and stood there and looked at him as he was looking down. It was like I was not even there. He did not even so much as look up and say, “I will be with you in a minute; I am really sorry, but I have to finish a transaction.” He did not say anything that made me feel important. You know what I thought as I was walking out, “If there was another computer store close by that sold this stuff, I would go there!” Well, what am I saying? I am saying that as a human being you know when you are being devalued, and you know when you are being valued. Yeshua made people feel valued. That is why publicans and sinners came to him. That is what we need to do. We need to so love people in our heart that our self-talk reflects how valuable people are, what a blessing they are, how good they are, and how wonderful G-d is by raising up people of all kinds.