I was surprised. While volunteering at a Berkeley business event recently several conversations with friends became more personal than our previous chats led us to expect.
Janet and I have worked in the business community with the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce for over a year now and have met a lot of new friends. Often we joke with our Chamber buddies that their meetings are our social life.
We get together regularly for networking breakfasts and after-work social gatherings, both of which allow businesspeople to identify potential vendors and customers in a relaxed environment. It’s fun, and everyone wins.
We’ve noticed, however, that our conversations at these events seem parked at a certain level of self-disclosure. That’s as natural as asking a Cal student, “So…what’s your major?” After a while, most relationships find a sort of equilibrium, a homeostatic point to which they tend to return over the long haul.
Self-disclosure usually is a function of trust, and how much of that is anyone likely to develop in a 3-minute conversation over scrambled eggs or fancy hors d’oeuvres? Since no one expects these events to be group therapy, we don’t find this disappointing, just natural to the context.
But then we volunteered to work at a large local festival with a group of other Chamber members. Instead of 3 minutes, we spent four hours together. Instead of a crowded room, we sat together at a table. Instead of a rush to get to the next appointment, we shared the end of a very enjoyable day aimed at promoting the economic development of our city.
And we talked. Before long we were all sharing things we had never discussed before. Every conversation thread felt appropriate but each snippet of talk also felt like we were being real or at least realer than we have ever been. I liked it.
The difference was not the people, but the context. More time + more privacy + less pressure = more trust = more self-disclosure = closer relationships.
I learned that moving a relationship to a deeper level sometimes means filing for a change of venue, so to speak. Common sense says that a conversation that works in a quiet coffee house is completely out of place in a crowded airliner.
When God wanted to draw us into relationship, a new context was needed. John’s account of Jesus’ life puts it this way:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ’He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
- John 1:14-18 (ESV)
Many cultures refer to this event in their celebration of Christmas. The followers of Jesus refer to it as the incarnation. God is revealed not through religious systems or philosophies, but in a change of venue, in sending the only begotten Son to become one of us.
As the God-man, Jesus lives our life, feels our pain and dies a death that defeats the power of sin, everything that separates us from God. Our reception of this gift brings us into God’s forever family. As John wrote almost twenty centuries ago:
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
- John 1:12-13 (ESV)
God has self-disclosed to us in Jesus. Trusting in this gift rather than in ourselves makes it possible for us to self-disclose in return. In that exchange we are reborn.
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