Collide

Before getting into my post, I wanted to link to the website of a gentleman who knows all about what it's like to collide:  http://www.sonofhamas.com/  The website contains free audio downloads of  interviews with this remarkable person who is the son of one of the founders of Hamas.  His story is far more important than what I'm going to be writing here, so that's why I've placed it at the beginning.  I encourage you to visit his page, read his book, or listen to his story.  You can come back to my blog if you like.
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There was a song called Collide by Howie Day that came out a few years ago.  I suppose it was a love song of sorts.  I was dating a girl around that time, and it had kind of become "our song".  After enough time went by, she wanted to get married.  I wasn't ready.  We collided alright.  In fact, I collided, not just with her, but with her father, mother, and brother.  Mutual friends distanced themselves from the situation, and I wound up feeling despondent, angry, and more hurt than I can remember ever feeling before.  Someone who once claimed to love me now treated me like a complete stranger.  We didn't understand one another's concerns or desires.  And we collided.  Things may have ended anyway, but they should have ended differently.

I've got a job.  A job where 95% of the customers are friendly and generally understanding.  But the 5% that don't get their way seem to turn on you like a mother grizzly whose cub you just tried to pick up and take home in your Subaru.  There are times you can be completely upfront with a person only to have them imply later that you misled them and complain that they are most displeased with their experience.  They'll want you to pay for their trouble even if they helped to cause it.  If you're really lucky, they'll ask to talk to your boss.  At times like these, I find it somewhat challenging not to say what I'm thinking, to deconstruct the faulty logic of my new found enemy, to unleash the dragon.  Once my blood gets boiling, I want nothing more than to thickly slather them with the facts, slide them onto the pan of truth, and watch them roast in the oven of reality.

I'm actually a pretty mild mannered person, almost a pushover some might say.  But when a certain line is crossed; when I encounter people being unfair or unjust, my instinct is to switch into search-and-destroy mode.  I'm not saying that this is necessarily a good thing, although I do believe there are rare times when search-and-destroy is the appropriate response.  I have engaged in this tit for tat with every intention of having the last and most powerful tit.  To give you some idea of what ensues--the other day someone told me in all seriousness, "You may win the battle, but you won't win the war!"  Honestly, who even says that in a business setting?  When you hear someone speaking like that, it's a pretty good indicator that things have escalated into the realm of the absurd.  So often we don't understand one another.  And so we collide.  The primal brain takes hold and haphazardly steers our adrenaline and shortly thereafter, our judgment.  Perhaps you've been in situations of conflict like this where it feels like you are on a high wire, and one slip can spell disaster.

But with experience comes improved control and capacity, and I was able to diffuse the above mentioned situation by doing the following: 1) informing the person that I wanted to switch gears and start over with them,  2) apologizing for the misunderstanding, 3) reminding the person that I had, in fact, done a very fine job on my end (which was true), and 4) setting the tone going forward and letting the person know he/she deserves my respect and I deserve his/hers in return.  Essentially what worked for me this time was reframing and redirecting the situation down a more positive road rather than doing what I usually do which is simply winning the argument.  I didn't hear another negative peep out of the person from that point on.  Now, I may still get bad mouthed all over town by this person (although I don't think so), but at least I didn't go away from the situation a big winner but still feeling like a big jerk.  We could have collided much worse.  Maybe I finally learned something from the times before. 

What's funny about conflict is that that same formula probably won't always work.  But I'm starting to find that, in general, it works much better to avoid simply going straight for the jugular and disproving another person's point of view (yes, even when they are indeed clearly wrong).  You can rarely win when you collide with someone. You can only entrench deeper and deeper while your opponent does the same.  As F.W. Borham once said, "The best way to prove a stick is crooked is to lay a straight one beside it."  The best way to "win" is the show your opponent the straight stick (ie what's right) and let them choose how they wish to react.  The hardest part for me is allowing them to act foolishly.  Just as importantly, and just as hard is realizing that I too can be wrong every once in a blue moon. 

What I'm trying to say is: life is pretty easy except where there are people involved.  Whether it's brought about by people at work, an ex, illegal immigrants, terrorists, or people of authority, it's in our nature sometimes to collide.  Some collisions are much more serious than others.  Some are given too much credit. 

But I'll leave you with this.  I saw a verse in the Bible this weekend that struck me in a way that verses in the Bible usually don't.  In fact, though I've often wanted the Bible to speak directly to me, I've spent most of my life not really "getting it" most of the time.  The verse is talking about Jesus:

"He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered.  He left his case in the hands of God, who always judges fairly." - 1st Peter ch. 2 vs. 23

What sort of socks it to me in this verse is that last part about God, "who always judges fairly".  Sometimes, life just flat out ain't fair.  People can be jerks, can be hateful, can be rude, can be evil.  You can't always even the score.  But that's where God comes in.  This verse helped to remind me that God knows much better than I when it is appropriate to even scores and when it is appropriate to show mercy or even take no action at all.  He knows what's up.  And it comforts me to realize that there is no need for revenge when the God of the universe already sees all things and cares about justice even more than I do.