Friends or Projects?

We've been reminded of an important distinction recently. We visit with a lot of students. With teaching and the family, time gets taken up quickly when you're also trying to spend a lot of time in lunches, etc. We were talking recently about how we've started to enjoy people as friends and not mere students. Just the other night, we had some of the most amazing time of laughing and joking with some student-friends. The conversation was so natural, I almost said to them, "You're so American," but really, people are the same everywhere, wanting to laugh and tell jokes. In this case, we simply were not having communication-language problems. We were understanding each other easily, but I equated that with being American, which was an incorrect assiciation.

Anyway, we've felt good about the amount of time and quality of timethat we've had with Chinese students. I have felt a pressure (within myself) to do more, and more, and more. I ask myself whether I'm doing enough. But in our discussion, we were reminded that here, we are to live life as we would anywhere. We are to have meals and time with friends, not projects. Every conversation does not have to lead to something more significant and meaningful that the simple enjoyment of each other's company. We have a tendency to approach people with agendas of different sorts. You know that you may be treating a person as project, rather than a person, when you have a conversation with them, and after you've said your piece, communicated your agenda, you have nothing else to talk about. That's a good indicator that we're forgetting to simply love and relate and enjoy our friends.