What are 3 Characteristics You Value in Another Person and Why?
#1 People Who Honor My Space
These people are there through the thick and thin. They lean in when the relationship gets rocky. They bring up issues and go through the process of letting the muck come up and slim all over everything, clean it up together and move forward with a deeper relationship as a result. I know I can trust them to let it go and move forward with involving other people. They bring laughter in hard and fun moments alike because there is so much shared experience and knowing that has taken place over time.
People that come to mind who hold these characteristics are my sister, some of my coworkers, and my mom.
In the past 10 years, I’ve gotten the profound blessing of living near my sister and working with her. It’s so fun to pop by her house for dinner or bump into her running in the neighborhood. We’ve also had some painful low moments, but we got to dig in and figure out what the problem was, learn together and grow forward. We both value our friendship more deeply as a result.
Additionally, working at the same place for 10 years naturally brings some fantastic highs and fabulous lows. Coworkers turned friends have been there for the low points at work (“Anne, do you really need to get that mad at someone on the phone??”) to low points in life (“You broke up??! Let’s get a beer”). I love that I have learned to anticipate what will make people mad and what will bring them joy and am able to adapt to work together smoothly. And they do the same for me.
My mom is a queen in this category, and my dad in a different way. My mom has sat through the darkest darks and still holds faith and hope for my future even when I don’t. She’s the most selfless woman I know and I’m grateful to be able to share space with her and trust her always. My dad is more of a side by side supporter and he his words of encouragement stick with me.
#2 Deeply Pursues Truth (Or stated another way “Has the radiance that comes from sitting at Jesus’s feet”)
I believe that Truth is objective. I can learn about it, I can be wrong about it, I can be corrected by it, and experience life more deeply through it. I believe Truth is a person who loves, serves, and awakens life after seasons of death and darkness. Restores after failure. I believe we can seek Truth and find Truth, we can misunderstand Truth, and have our worldview and our empathy transformed by Truth.
When I know another person possesses the radiance that comes from sitting at the feet of Truth and walking in dirty trenches where Truth encounters a broken reality, I feel an immediate peace about that person and a trust in their perspective. There’s a shared context where I know they can love me honestly and rebuke or correct me in love from a vantage point that I know is True even if I didn’t realize it before. Generally, these people have suffered and found a deeper Truth as a result.
I identify these people by the decisions they make, the way they receive inconvenient disruption, the honesty with which they share their struggles and weaknesses, the way they hear and empathize with others’ stories, and the consistency they hold in their private life when no one seems to be looking.
People who come to mind when I think of this characteristic are my Pastor at my last church, a friend I had in a volunteer ministry, my mentor in college, and my mom and my sisters.
With each of these people (save my family), there was generally a single moment that they shared something and in that moment, I realized there was a level of unshakeable trust. With my family, I’ve gotten to see it evolve over the years.
#3 People who Hustle
This one I 100% get from my parents, particularly my dad. I’m learning to value rest, but rest is best when it comes after the deeply satisfying exhaustion of working hard at something meaningful.
Something breaks and they fix it. Email a request and you can trust it’s already done. Plan to meet, you know they’ll be there. They have meaningful careers because whatever they’re doing, they put heart and soul in and make it excellent. There’s a passion that is contagious and life giving. And then the rest at the end of the day or the end of the week is sweet.
Outside of my family informing my admiration for this characteristic, I’ve seen it again and again in my coworkers. I have one coworker who’s a lifelong Manufacturing Technician. His work can be quite repetitive and some would consider it dull, but he has more passion for what he does than most people I know. He is proud of every product that the team makes (I mean every individual product that comes off the line) and inspires me to take pride in my work, which I might otherwise consider to be meaningless.
Bonus characteristic
As a plus, I value people who bring laughter in the course of all these things. Laughter has less value to me when it’s not rooted in these other things. But when someone adds laughter as the cherry on the top of the ice cream, it is delightful.
