Who was your wife's favorite elementary school teacher? Why? What, besides sex and food, fascinated your husband in his teen years? And what particular aspect of that object of fascination absorbed and delighted him? What is the Lord's calling and purpose for your child? You know what she likes to do, but why does she like to do it? What calls to her in that activity? What's causing her spirit to leap? For what uniqueness in all the earth did God shape her? And what earlier life experience causes that fellow church member to commandeer conversations and drag them into some small context of self-congratulation, or to always put his hands in his back pockets when he prays?

You and I don't really know the persons "close" to us. Because of our own woundedness and consequent self-serving vows and demands, the very best of us have been defensive, unforgiving, judgmental, bitter, and manipulative. We have not bothered to know these singular God- sculptures, these two-legged spirit poems from his mouth, because we haven't bothered to become students of them; explorers, examiners, spelunkers, and exponents of them. It's been too easy to marginalize them based on sloppy and automatic conjecture.

The assumption of our age--that every aspect of every person, place, or thing is the result of a ubiquitous evolutionary process--has contributed to our blindness. We tend to see human beings as the uniform manufactured product of a universal production line. We admit variations, but assume they're superficial, and that somewhere over all things is a transcendent Henry Ford of a God running the production line, building human persons from interchangeable parts.

We live in a world of unconscious generic presupposition, based on the thought of people like Aristotle and Descarte. We automatically slot the persons around us into public, standardized categories, then expect them to perform as precise functional units in home, school, and workplace. Then, after this dehumanization by means of the broad and generic, we dare to expect and demand that the persons around us shrink to fit precisely into our own tiny esoteric reality. This is, frankly, insane.

It's against this tendency that the grace of God stands, calling us to become students and aficionados, first of Him, then of one another. The grace of God in Christ is a grace of specificity. You, in particular, as a unique, minutely known child of God, are given pardon, freedom, and personal, peculiar access to God and His family and creation. Then you become a local partner in giving specific, customized pardon, freedom, and access to the persons God gives you guided by the God-crafted particulars of their being, their purpose, and their calling.

So the activity of relationship is constantly to research those in our life and make discoveries about them, sacrificially absorbed in finding new ways to release them into the particulars of the spacious freedom and purpose in which God intends them to dwell. The Bible calls this grace. And health. And fishing for men. And soundness. And fullness of the Spirit. And love.