Connecting Healing for Ourselves and Our Relationships by Larry Crabb

Path towards Discovering the Self and God in "Connecting: Healing for ourselves and our relationships" by Larry Crabb Larry Crabb, in his book "Connecting: Healing for ourselves and our relationships: a radical new vision" offers a thorough analysis of the importance of social interaction and relationships as the key towards rediscovering one's self and one's relationship with God.

Crabb offers an alternative to the numerous ways of discovering the Christian way of living: while others offer self-discovery as a way to discovering God, the author recommends that we take a look at the people around us, our interaction and relationship with them, in order to, in the process, understand ourselves and our relationship with God.

By providing a personal account of his life and his relationship with his family, Crabb made his readers understand how his notion of social relationships as the key to discovering the right way to Christian living. In narrating his experience in "Kep's Story," he, as a father to his son Kep, realized that in order to discover one's self and God, one must keep in touch with the people around him.

Kep's failure to meet his father's standards and expectations, when he was kicked out from school, made Crabb realize that he had been adopting the wrong way of relating to the individual most important to him: his son.

He declares, "...I had no thought of releasing him, I wanted only to control him, to reduce him to something predictable..." This is perhaps one of the main problems that we encounter as individuals when relating to other people: we try to make everyone as "predictable" as possible, not realizing that people's behavior and attitude are ever-changing, and that we are susceptible to external influence (e.g., influences from friends, academic environment).

This reflection from the author manifests one important aspect of "connecting:" the key to understanding the self and God is to acknowledge the fact that every individual and must be understood in various perspectives, in the same way that we and God are truly unique from other people. The book recommends a way to enhance social relationships with our family, friends, and other people, known or total strangers to us.

The kind of relationship that Crabb wants to focus on is not the shallow relationships that we usually cultivate with the people we know. Connecting must happen from within our hearts, with the desire to truly love and care for others. Although Crabb acknowledges that hurt and sadness inevitably comes with authentic care and love, it is this fear of being hurt that keeps people from "opening up," from realizing our true capabilities about loving and being loved in return.

It is evident that relationships we keep with other people are made out of convenience, ensuring us that, should the relationship fail to develop 'wonderfully,' we.