Sheryl Brady - Correctly Cultivating our Connections

On your way down, tell somebody, «Cultivate your connections.» It has been said that if you want to know who you will become tomorrow, take a close look at who you call your friends today. I don’t know who said that; I think I might have said it, but anyway, that’s a good one. If you want to know who you will become tomorrow, take a good, close look at who you call your friends today. Often, people have more influence—a greater influence—on our lives than we realize, or maybe you do know, but you just don’t want to admit it. Relationships really do matter; if they didn’t, God would not have said, «It is not good for man to be alone.» We are truly better together; we are also created to coexist. We are created to need each other. Many people went through horrendous times during the pandemic because they suffered from a lack of connection. God created me to need you, and He created you to need me. He wired us for relationships. Romans 12, write it down: Verse 5 tells us that we, numerous as we are, are one body in Christ, and individually, we are parts of one another—mutually dependent on one another. Now, you may not realize it or you may not want to admit it, but if you are a part of the body of Christ, and you are sitting next to a person who is also part of the body of Christ, you are dependent and connected, according to Romans 12:5, to the person you’re sitting next to. Just look at them and say, «I need you.» The problem is, it’s not always easy to stay connected because life happens. Life happens, and the next thing you know, you’ve been pulled this way or that way, or you go through something that causes a separation, or you experience hurt, disappointment, or pain. Whatever it is, these things cause shifts in your life, and before you know it, that relationship you felt connected to has begun to crumble. In our world, we are filled with so many disposable things. How many of you know that we have a lot of disposable things? When my kids were little, a wipe was just a baby washcloth that you wet before leaving home, put in a sandwich bag, and sealed it up—if you could afford the sealed bags; if not, you just tucked that one in. Y’all are so bougie, like you’ve never had to seal up a sandwich bag! We didn’t have wipes; if we did, I probably couldn’t afford them. But now we have disposable plates, disposable cups, disposable cutlery, disposable food containers, disposable gloves, and disposable diapers. We have disposable cameras. Does anyone still use disposables? Don’t raise your hand, but they used to take some of the greatest pictures I captured. We even have disposable batteries! Because we’re so inundated with disposable things in our lives, we should be very careful not to be so quick to dispose of the relationships that God has sent our way. What makes our relationships fall apart? Why do they go bad? What is destroying them, and how do we fix them? How do we build new ones? Some people are just not good at building new relationships. Better yet, how do we prevent the ones we are in from crumbling right at our feet? Those are all very valid, very important questions. I think that if we’re going to improve our relationships, we have to look at them intentionally. If you don’t build it, you won’t have it. Let me say that again: If you don’t build a marriage, you won’t have one. If you’re waiting on just affection, you aren’t going to have anything because your affection might wear off someday. But let me give you a little secret: There will always be differences between us, so we must build room into our relationships for disappointments, disagreements, and differences. The only people who agree on everything are dead people, okay? So if you say you always get along with everybody perfectly, then either you’re lying or you’re dead—and all your friendships are dead too. God made us different on purpose. We have different opinions about things; we have different perceptions. We see things from different angles. We have different personalities, ideas, and interests, and there is a reason for that. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons God gave us families is because family is a place where He can take my differences and your differences, merge them together, and use that environment to teach us relational skills. Okay, you shouldn’t have to wait until you get out into the world to learn some kind of relational skills; you should have learned them at home. Family is the laboratory of learning, okay? I’m going to say it again: Family is the laboratory of learning, and whatever you learn in that setting, you ought to be able to pick it up and carry it into whatever setting your life’s journey takes you. You ought to be able to take something from home and apply it to the lowest point you go to, and you ought to be able to take something from home and use it in the highest place you reach. Unfortunately, we are not always taught as we need to be taught on how to nurture healthy relationships at home, especially in my generation. See, we were taught things like, «Say you’re sorry.»