Being friends with other people's parents

It's surreal how air travel makes the world smaller. Beijing is only 2 hours away; all the conveniences and luxuries of a Western lifestyle seem so accessible. I haven't been to Beijing in a while (2006) and it seems so different to me. It seems really modern and clean (well as clean as you can expect). Big highways, little to no dust. Lots of cars and lots of Western amenities. Cookie's parents graciously hosted me. I had a great time hanging out with them; I learned a lot, and I mean a lot, about Cookie and her parents, Auntie and Uncle Shoe. It has always been pretty easy for me to connect with my friends' parents; I've learned that the keys are listening and asking questions. Older people love to talk about themselves and love to give advice. Myself included. Being almost 32 automatically qualifies you for the "older people" crowd. Ironically, my interaction with my parents isn't the same as my interaction with my friends' parents. It's unrealistic to expect that my relationship with my parents would be the same. There's more history. There's more emotion. There's a deeper understanding about the nature of the person and the color of the relationship. These things are absent from my conversations with my friends' parents; in an absurdly unintuitive way, distance builds intimacy. In the ideal world, those that we know the best and love the most, these relationships would be the ones that we would enjoy abundantly. But this is hardly the ideal world and oftentimes we find that not knowing someone allows us to appreciate the relationship even more; the cliché . Perhaps that is why the spectrum of relationships is so wide and why even our most intimate and best relationships do not exclude the existence of others. And, perhaps, this is why the common scenario of one of your friends getting a significant other and then abandoning all of their non-romantic relationships is distasteful. Not just for the fact that they deserted your friendship (which is painful and annoying) but it shows a kind of immaturity that fails to recognize that our relational needs are deep and that they are most likely not met in the soul of one person. Even being married to the Boss, as wonderful and exclusive as it is, we both recognize that there are some things that can only be met in the other and there are other things that will never be satisfied by the other. I feel like this is a reminder by the Divine of how complex and needy we are and how gracious He is to provide for those needs in the friendship and love of others. Movie that best describes my trip: Meet the Parents