I have recently been reading a world leading researcher’s interest in High Quality Connections. Jane Dutton is an academic, committed to helping communities enjoy a great working environment. She’s been highly effective in helping organisations experience wellbeing-related success. In her research, she talks about high quality connections having the following three qualities:
- Respectful engagement i.e. people are approached with esteem, dignity, and care.
- Task enabling i.e. the connection helps someone complete or perform a task.
- Playfulness i.e. there’s a shared sense of ‘fun’ in getting things done.
Reading about Jane’s field of expertise caused me to become naturally curious about how Jesus interacted with people. If you met Him, what would you experience? I wonder what you would feel? I wonder how the encounter would affect your life? How would you describe His connection with you?
I began looking for informed, knowledgeable reflections about how Jesus interacted with people.
It lead me to a blog site (Bible.Org), where someone looked at many interactions between Jesus and others. The below questions guided the research. They were used for assessing multiple connections.
- Who started the conversation?
- Where did the conversation take place?
- What was discussed?
These questions contributed into the below summarised understandings:
- Jesus knew how to initiate conversations.
- He responded to the initiatives of others.
- He left room in his daily life for interruptions, by friends and others who were seeking his help.
- Jesus typically met people ‘on their own turf’.
- He was interested in establishing common ground with others.
If interested, you can read the full articleat https://bible.org/illustration/how-jesus-interacted-people
The take-away …
The way we connect with each other has a direct effect on how we feel. It can cause us to experience increased feelings associated with wellbeing. If this happens, it typically becomes ‘contagious’. Your wellbeing affects others. Consequently, others in our life-space experience increased feelings of wellbeing too.
We take our lead from Jesus’ example of love. People always matter. We see everyone in our community deserving God’s unconditional love. It makes us different. Christians see humanity from God’s perspective; a lens of perfect love.
I encourage you to help continue to reflect God’s love in our community at SCBC. His love is compassionate, kind, and honest. God’s attracted to what we can do, not distracted by what we can’t do, or how ‘bad’ we’ve been. His love displaces fear, and leads us into realising how uniquely precious we have each been created. If you look into the Bible, you’ll find encouragement like the verses below:
“Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” Ephesians 4:2
“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” 1 John 4
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” 1 Peter 4:8
Thank you for helping to make South Coast Baptist College a great place to bring up our children.
Des Mitchell
PRINCIPAL