How to Keep Friends and Treasure Your People

It’s no secret that relationships can become fragile, rocky, or flat-out severed due to recent hot topics. If you take all of the political, religious, gender, race, environmental, and other controversial issues, and toss them into a giant, bubbling, angry pot, you will have what we refer to as Facebook, where no subject is off limits, no emotion is held back, and filters are not required.

We love social media for its connecting capabilities, yet we tire of the cover it provides people, enabling them to hurl insults, and revealing information we may not want to know about our friends and loved ones.

Sharing beliefs is a vital and fruitful part of relationships. It bonds us, stretches us, empowers us, and helps us to understand one another. The problem with discussing our biggest issues regarding the big issues comes when we heat them up, then pour them onto each other, in hopes of somehow burning the other person until they finally realize we are so right and they are so wrong.

We’re seeing beloved friends and even close family members who we have bonded with over coffee, card games, parties, girls’ nights, and holidays being condensed down from our comrades in life to a shunned picture on the internet. Yes, it’s very sad. If we truly want peace, it starts in our personal lives.

I hope the points below will help you to treasure your people.

1. Ask ourselves what the goal is.

Facebook is our own personal stage where we tell our stories and share our beliefs. It sounds lovely, but the downfall is that many of us are beating our beliefs over each other’s heads.

If we are fighting to win people over to be a part of the change we want to see in the world, this just isn’t going to work. Telling others how right we are and how wrong they are serves to lessen our cause, and will forever fall on deaf ears. We are perpetuating a dark cycle, a cycle filled with the exact actions we are ultimately fighting against.

If our goal is to unite, we can no longer bring our neighbors down for our own causes, and should instead begin raising each other up! Is it your goal to unite or to fight? If it’s your goal to fight, what does the end prize look like to you? If it looks like peace, love, and acceptance for all mankind, that starts in your environment with those nearest to you, including people you disagree with. Imagine if we were to all start dealing out the kindness, acceptance, and respect that we know all humans deserve, in our own, little communities. We are doing a disservice to our cause by skipping over the people right in front of us in order to serve those out of sight.

2. Stop pigeon holing others…and ourselves.

We are dealing people into political categories and each comes with its own shortcomings and achievements. These categories cripple relationships, because they aren’t who we are. For example, I have gone from one political extreme to another in a span of about fifteen years. I’m glad Facebook wasn’t around for me to lose friends, over the values I held most dear back then, because I would have lost an entire different set of friends today. What has not changed during this morphing, learning journey is my need for relationships. If I know my own beliefs aren’t anchored, why would I lock someone I care about into a box, leaving out the wonderful things I adore about them?

On the other hand, most of us want to belong to and fit into a political party. Sometimes, even if we don’t believe everything that group stands for, we are willing to bend and contort a little to fit in the mold. Sometimes that mold is a little uncomfortable, but by golly, we chose it. We may stick beside it even when we know we don’t fully agree with all aspects of it, possibly out of embarrassment or stubbornness. We sometimes look at the other parties, compete with them, and judge them for the beliefs they do or don’t support. We may hope to be the superior political party, or at the least, the most righteous, with long lists of noble achievements as proof of our goodness. When we take a step back, we know this isn’t how we want to be with the people we care about. It just flat-out doesn’t feel good.

It’s time we drop and allow others to leave the constricting labels that don’t completely honor our hearts, in order to get a clearer view of our friends and families.

3. Make it a mission to understand each other.

When we notice our friends supporting different principles than we do, it’s now common practice for us to walk away from them without question. This is why we are all in such a divisive conundrum as of late. For Pete’s sake! We work hard for these relationships! We have deep-rooted histories with our families! Our people are worth wading through the mud for.

We all have a grand story, be it good or bad. There’s no reason to believe that the place where our stories have landed us is the only prime realty out there, and no other spot is worth exploring. At the heart of each of our stories, is a very good reason for our beliefs. To treasure our people, it should be our goal to seek to understand each other’s stories, and to realize that we might even hold the same values given their circumstances.

4. See the good in each other.

If we can let our pride slip away enough to shake off the non-acceptance of our friends, it will be much easier to expose the good in them. To halt the vicious cycle we’re in, it’s also extremely important to try to view good in people even if they don’t seek to see the good in you.

We’ve allowed beliefs to become one another’s sole identities. I know for a fact that people in my life who think very differently than I, are at their heart’s core, wonderful, worthwhile, kind, and endearing. They are made up of much more than just a set of beliefs. They are their laughter, their joy, their funny jokes, their awful jokes, their impressive cooking skills, their rocking parenting, their goofy dance moves, their child-like innocence, their creativity, their passions, their smiles, their frowns, their raw humanity, and their beautiful stories.

5. Challenge ourselves to talk in person.

In order to see and hear the hearts of our people, sometimes we have to walk away from the computer and toward the person. Facebook only shows us a fraction of people, but when we are with them, we get to see SO much more of who they are. Real life discussions culminate into love and appreciation for each other much smoother than they do online. You can look into people’s eyes, hear their voices, see their expressions, and above all, know just how deserving they are of your respect. It’s easy to dish out hefty helpings of harsh feelings on social media, but to share who we are in person is a much more challenging and rewarding experience!

In Conclusion: The best thing we can do to keep friends and treasure our people is to look for the beauty in each and every human we encounter, to have grace with them, to be ready to offer up forgiveness at any time, to try to love and accept them no matter what, and especially, to stop believing our road is the highest.