The Company you keep

All my childhood I remember my parents being very particular about the kids I hung out with. They constantly monitored and watched what I was doing with my friends and also watched my friends. There was only one way to describe how I felt - FURIOUS! How dare they told me what to do and whom to hang out with!

Now as a mother of 2 children, I do exactly the same thing. Its a fine line between discrimination and making sure you are around people who will not influence you in the wrong way. I pray always that God will grant me the wisdom to be fair and understanding and also to keep my children away from bad influence. Its a tough job for sure.

So why is company so important. I was listening to one of those talks [I think it was Dale Sutherland] and he was talking about how when he was working 16 hrs as a policeman and hanging out with folks who measured or showed toughness by being rough and angry, he found that he had started behaving in the same way - not at work but also around his own family. I reflected on the changes that my husband and I have gone through over the years. When we married, apart from the core values we cherished we were East and West. I was impatient and always on the go and a perfectionist. He was patient, laid back and didn't particularly care that the paper on the table was not parallel to the edge. As you can imagine, there were a lot of things that we didn't agree about and me being more vocal gave my voice box plenty of exercise. 

As time passed, I found that we both were moving in nature towards each other. Of course over the years I had seen the value of how important my husband's take on life was to maintain sanity in our house even though I didn't want to acknowledge it. As he became more vocal, I was becoming calmer. He's no where near how I used to be but I do appreciate that he is speaking up. We hope to meet in the middle or a little more towards his side on some things and towards mine in other things. The important thing I learnt was that the more time you spent with someone, the more you influence or get influenced. 

I do believe that God has given us instincts to know where we would fit in and be comfortable. The problems usually arise when we ignore those instincts in our bid to fit in. We probably do that because our need to be accepted is so great that we are willing to give up some of our values for it. 

Company, I believe should be a symbiotic relationship where each benefits from the other's positive attributes. If that is not happening, its better to break free and look elsewhere before we change our values. After all the only thing that a person can call his own is his values.

"You can not change the people around you, but you can change the people that you choose to be around."