Winter through a Relational lens

Quote

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.”  Albert Schweitzer

News

Energy supplies to central Europe could be disrupted again this winter after Russia cut oil deliveries to neighbouring Belarus in a dispute over tariffs, reported the Guardian earlier this week.  In what is becoming an annual confrontation, negotiators from Russia and some of her neighbours battle it out over the terms of trade in oil and gas.  Ukraine and Belarus depend heavily on Russia for their energy supplies, and in turn, Russia depends on them for the safe transit of oil and gas exports to other European countries.  A year ago, the standoff led to soaring wholesale gas prices and supply cuts that left millions of households in Eastern Europe without gas for several days – leading to scores of additional deaths.

This illustrates how vulnerable third parties are to the consequences of relationship breakdown over an issue in which they are not directly involved. Often the people worst affected are low income households, far removed from the power struggles of political leaders; this additional dimension of justice further underscores the vital importance of conflict resolution. 

Read on...

The chapter entitled “Forgiveness” in The R Option (Schluter and Lee, 2003) urges us to take the costly, yet liberating, path of forgiveness when relationships go wrong – at the individual, community or even national level.  Peppered with examples from Northern Ireland, the Balkans, South Africa, and going back to the second world war, it presents some of the challenges and rewards of reconciling relationships that are frozen in a state of winter brokenness.  To read it, follow this link http://www.relationshipsglobal.net/Web/OnlineStore/Product.aspx?ID=35

Walk the talk 

Take one of the many opportunities that the cold snap presents to lend a helping hand – pushing the car of someone who is stuck, shovelling snow from an elderly neighbour’s path, assisting someone across an icy car park at the supermarket, or phoning a person you know who may be housebound, to see if all is well.

The last word

From the Bible, Exodus 22:26-27.  “If you take your neighbour's cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body.  What else will he sleep in?  When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.”