Last night my friend Mary Twin came to dinner.
Mary is back home in South Africa on a visit from Germany where she is currently working, and volunteered to make my wife Val and myself a vegetarian meal. So we quickly agreed.
I know Mary from when she, and her twin sister Nancy, were young high school girls in a youth group I led probably fifteen years ago and now they are two of my good friends. We’ve missed her as she has been gone for about seven months now and so it was obvious that we would end up hanging out with food and music and some form of good chocolate (Yum!)
HOP TOPICS
We didn’t sit down beforehand and decide what we would talk about, in fact if we had it is more than likely that we would not have ended up talking about all of the following things:
Abortion, nazis, Trump, public transport, juvenile prisoner rehabilitation, dementia, Brexit, veganism, race, being evicted, parenting, homosexuality, political correctness, sustainable farming, sweatshops, ethics of clothes, and animal cruelty.
It’s quite a list and I am probably leaving one or two things out.
We enjoy lots of laughs, we often play board games, we can get up to superficial silly fun, but we can also get deep and have intense fulfilling conversations.
BOTH/AND
Probably five hours of conversation including a meal being made and consumed made up our time together. And it was such a great catch up. And we ended talking about different comedy shows we were enjoying. There really was a bit of everything.
The reason I wanted to write about this today is that I don’t think this is always the case. There are various people and sometimes groups of friends who can so easily get caught up discussing things on a superficial level, and it never gets beyond that.
While I don’t want to suggest an either/or approach at all, I would encourage you to make sure that you are friends with the kinds of people who can have conversations like this. And that you are intentional creating spaces where discussing world issues on a deeper level becomes a more natural thing.
If, when you get together with your friends, your conversation only ever touches on music, movies, sport and food then I think you might be missing out.
CONVERSATION THAT CHANGES YOU
What helps when you start diving into deeper conversations is having people who love you but don’t think the same as you. There are many areas that Mary Twin and I agree strongly on, but also some that we think very differently about. She is a vegetarian dabbling with veganism and we are one week on one week off meat consumers who are dabbling with better sources of food. This means that when we dive into a topic, there is opportunity to grow and learn and be challenged.
Social media can be a dangerous place to air a view (any view – everything you believe is guaranteed to offend at least one person, usually more). But sitting around a meal with people you care about, is one of the best places to dig a little deeper and share your views with each other.
If these kinds of conversations are not something that you have experienced much of, the best way to start is to host one. Invite friends who think differently to a meal at your house and see how the conversation goes. You can even be a little intentional and have some ideas of the topics you might want to discuss. But you don’t want it to feel too formal or like a meeting. So mostly just see how it goes.
At the end of the evening, the idea is not that everyone leaves thinking exactly the same about every topic of conversation that has been engaged. But the hope is that everyone has been challenged in the way they think about something and that they will continue to think further as they leave your house. Maybe even that some changes will occur in different peoples’ lives.
How about you? Would you say deep conversations are the norm when you get together with your friends? Or is this something that might need a little more work and cultivation to see it happening?