Welcome to this conversation

Better than Compromise - Episode 3: A Commitment to the Big Win Let’s be clear, the Big Win was not the win some people got and others did not in the election. It is the win that is difficult to imagine and even harder to make happen, yet it asks for your commitment. Will you commit to a win neither you or the other side could accomplish alone, and that neither of you can see coming? It is the win God could see coming but that requires some explanation. Thanks for listening.

A Commitment to the Big Win

Both of these sets of words are important but they are different. The first 3 words are your reaction, the second 3 words are your choice. Your choice is your independent will, not your impulse driven by your feelings. Better than compromise doesn’t deny how you feel, it acknowledges your emotions and feelings as essential for self-honesty and empathy, but it uses them to inform, not dictate, what you do. This is where a commitment to the Big Win comes from.

Something to consider:

How do you think these perspectives and skills need to be applied to our national discourse in these polarized times, and how do you think you personally need to apply them to your relationships with the people in your own life? What is the overlap of those two circles?

How do you see others who are different from you?

How can you move seeing people you have differences with from the left end of this spectrum to the right end?

There is only one commitment to make in a relationship, and it is to the Big Win.

Consider this quote from the podcast. What do you think?

“A commitment to another person without a commitment to The Big Win in that relationship is not going to last. It is going to be dependent on feeling good about how the relationship is going, how you feel about that other person, whether you are getting your needs met, on whether you are happy. And if things aren’t going your way, then that relationship becomes burdensome because your ability to commit is only as much as what you are getting back from the relationship the way it is right now. Commitment without a vision of The Big Win is really just obligation and duty. And that only lasts so long because it doesn’t have a big enough vision to pull in all the tough stuff, the real stuff, the whole stuff of the other person.”

A commitment to the Big Win seeks reconciliation before resolution.

Reconciliation focuses on who we are. Resolution focuses on what we are doing. 

What do you think? Can you truly resolve a deeply embedded difference without dealing with your acceptance of who that other person is?

Consider: 

Reconciliation does not equal capitulation, accommodation or suppression of your real self or convictions. It does not wait for permission to do what it believes is right, but continues to respect and value the other and refuses to become what it fights in the championing of what it seeks. Reconciliation is transformative.

What does God, the 3rd Strand have to do with this? Rather than thinking about God as some being with supreme power mandating that we get along, think of God as the fabric of existence that we are all woven into, and therefore the deepest and truest oneness that we have with each other; the level at which we need to connect with each other if we are to overcome our surface differences. With that perspective consider this and try to read past the ‘bible-y’ language.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human (outward) point of view; even though we once knew Christ that way, we no longer know him like that. So if anyone is known in Christ, they are a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to God’s self through Christ, and has given us this work of reconciling with one another. 2 Corinthians 5.16-18   

We are all good at building aquariums but few of us are good at living in the ocean.

How does this relate to your life? In what ways do you find yourself creating a smaller, more comfortable and manageable world, even though it isn’t the real world? And what does it feel like to you when your ‘aquarium’ falls apart and you are confronted with the complexity and uncertainty of the real world?

A last thought:

We are not the first to take on this quest for something bigger than win/lose or compromise. People have sought it for millennia and we have their stories. These few sentences from the Bible sum up what some who have gone before us - and we too - are about on the search for Better Than Compromise.

People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they wanted what they did have, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were looking for a far better country than that—heavenly country.            Hebrews 11.14-16

Talk more about this with a group

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