Lesson 3 is "Don't spend time with people who don't treat you well."
I explained this rather crudely to a little brother/dong-seng in his early 20s once as "when you're in your 30s, you don't give a shit about what other people think of your choices anymore... you just do what you gotta do." What I meant by this was not that we should make bad choices that draw negative opinions from others. The context of our conversation was his doing things he doesn't want to do and hanging out with people with whom he'd rather not just because he didn't want his friends to think badly of him. Who cares?? You gotta do what you gotta do. And if friends think badly of you when you do what you gotta do, then maybe they're not really good friends.
I am Beloved. Whether or not friends think so or regardless of how others treat us, we are Beloved. By God. So why spend time with people who contradict this fact? Time is precious and limited. We've only got so much of it. Better to surround ourselves with people who affirm the truth of our identity than ones who lie to us.
I'm not going to go into the Beloved bit because someone else does this so much better than I can: Henri Nouwen. I strongly recommend reading Life of the Beloved.
Between my marriage, raising kids, my family, my job, and my various hobbies, I barely get enough sleep or time to eat. I don't have a lot of time to waste on sorting out mixed messages and falsehoods and licking wounds. So I prefer not avoid people who give me mixed messages and falsehoods and wounds in the first place. It's hard enough to find as much time as I'd like to spend with people who treat me well for heaven's sakes! Nobody's perfect and relationships aren't always smooth sailing, but the ones in which I can live as the Beloved and I can treat the other as the Beloved are the ones to keep.
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