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...

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…