Happy New Relationships by Andy Straka

     Happy New Year!

     May you enjoy a healthy, peaceful, and prosperous 2011.

     In church this morning our pastor spoke about the role of relationships in our lives.  Relationships, he said, are more important than anything else. They are more important than money, more important than career, more important than education, more important than status or celebrity or whatever other yardsticks our popular culture happens to be pitching.  Our relationships with those around us and ultimately with our creator will be what define us in the end.

     I got to thinking afterward about the pastor’s sermon and how it relates to those of us who write.  What is writing after all but an intimate relationship between writer and reader? An invitation and an engagement.   A seduction, if you will.  A promise from the writer to the reader that what the writer has to say is important—you won’t be disappointed—and perhaps most importantly of all a means to follow through on that promise.

     The turn of the New Year is supposed be about resolutions and new beginnings.  Quite honestly I’ve never been too keen about the artificiality of making some sort of resolution based merely on a change in the calendar.  (I mean, aren’t we supposed to be thinking that way all of the time?)  But this year I’ve decided to make an exception.  My New Year’s resolution is pretty simple: to strengthen each of the relationships in my life, to become a better listener, a better husband, a better father, and a better writer, and to continue to reach out for new relationships through my interactions with people and through my writing.

     Those of us who write enjoy the privilege of being able to magnify our relationships far beyond our immediate circle of family and friends.  If you write, whom will you influence, and with whom will you gain a new relationship through your words today?  Someone young? Someone old?  Someone half way across the country?  Someone half way across the world?  Someone in the middle of the night even when you are fast asleep?

     That’s what I call leveraging the power of relationship.

www.andystraka.com