My friend slammed my slam right back at me, so I undercut the ping-pong ball with all the spin I could muster.  He responded with a smooth cut as the ball spun to my left so I countered to his right, back and forth we went until one of us finally missed!

In real life, many people play a similar game called reciprocation, returning the favor, paying back the compliment or mirroring the insult.   I heard about a wealthy old man whose hard working, but financially struggling 50-year-old son had lost the transmission on his car.  When someone suggested to the old man to help his son with his car situation, the old man scratched his beard and said, “My son hasn’t spent much time with me lately, and he’s old enough to take care of himself.”

Reciprocation certainly falls short of Jesus’ call to wash each other’s feet, or to “love one another as I have loved you.” ^{John 13:34}

While this ping-pong living can sometimes be so evident in others, my goal today is to make you and I aware of it, so we can examine ourselves to see if we too might sometimes act this way – especially with our relatives. . .

Think specifically about the people who were involuntarily placed into your life. . . Your parents, siblings, in-laws and out-laws.  You didn’t get a chance to choose any of them, and some of them are sure difficult.

They ping us in their own special way, so we often pong them right back.

What if today, we started by thinking about just one relative who really pings us.  What if we wrote a short list about all the good in them!  What good traits do they have?  What do others like about them and what does Jesus think about them?

Write it down.  It’s a little ping-pong exercise that might help us break the cycle and take a whole new look at them.   It just might yield big results.