[The best place to talk is a meal; photo attribution: Office.com; licence free)]
A good conversation is one of the greatest and most enjoyable pleasures in life. It can also make a tremendous contribution to personal growth and development. Franziska and I count it a significant blessing that people who come to stay with us because we are part of the Leadership Retreat Centre fill our home with conversations and stories that are both deep and meaningful. We have come to realize that at times these conversations are the most important thing we do.
I first caught on to the importance of conversations, well, perhaps not for the first time, but certainly in a deeper way, on what was probably the worst day of my life. I was in England for the defence of my dissertation, and although it had not gone overly bad (in the end, the dissertation was accepted), it had been a most unpleasant experience that left me feeling positively miserable.
So I went out and bought myself a book. I guess other people in similar situations buy clothes or shoes or junk food, but I bought a book. Its title was “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places”, it was written by Eugene Peterson, and it was the first volume of five on what he called spiritual theology, or in more concrete language: actually living the Christian life.
That evening I spent something like two hours just reading and rereading the introduction. It spoke powerfully into my experience of the day. It provided me with comfort by giving meaning to the experience.
Now here is what this has to do with the subject of this story: the subtitle of the book is “A Conversation in Spiritual Theology”. I find the concept intriguing: writing a book that is a conversation – what a beautiful thought! It is not the author lecturing, it is not I dissecting and criticising, giving it five stars or only one. It is the author and the reader entering into a conversation. It is the author pulling me in into a conversation he has been having over the years with lots of other people, a conversation full of depth and meaning.
Somehow, this stuck with me and has made me more sensitive to the pivotal role and great value of good conversations. We’d like a lot more of these to happen in our home.
So when you come, let’s talk.