Does it say anything about me that I have friends who couldn’t be friends with one another? Probably not anything unique. I suspect that most of us have had the experience of organizing a party and inviting friends from two different contexts only to discover that they don’t get along very well. Last week at a conference, sitting on a veranda in the evening, sipping a Lemon Soda while almost everyone else was having an alcoholic drink of some kind, I thought, “Several of these people are friends, even good friends. Yet they would be very uncomfortable with most of my colleagues from BYU and, perhaps, vice-versa. And some friends from my ward would be shocked that I have friends like these. Nevertheless, I feel comfortable with all three groups as well as others. ” <\/p>\n
As I said, I imagine that most people have something like that experience. It isn’t a matter of being a chameleon, of blending into whatever environment one finds oneself in. Yet it is a matter of being a different person in different contexts, while, in another sense, remaining the same. I am both many and one. I am not the same person on Times and Seasons that I am in the university classroom or with my grandchildren or with members of my Sunday School class or with the friends that Janice and I have dinner with regularly. I behave and talk differently with different sets of friends without feeling that I have done something wrong. <\/p>\n
How do we know, however, when getting along and fitting into a context has gone too far, when we have given up our integrity? Surely it is more than switching from Lemon Soda to gin and tonic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Does it say anything about me that I have friends who couldn’t be friends with one another?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}