RIght? Wrong?

Our Church has a softball team. We play a season in the Fall and in the Spring. It was not too many season ago that we won our Division in the Church League. This Spring Season our team has had several of our regular team members move away from the area, a few had work conflicts, one was deployed… This Season we were moved up a division from what we are used to playing.

This has been a rough season for our team both on and off the diamond. Many of our team members have had something traumatic happen off the field. For many seasons the diamond was a place we could come to and relieve some of the stuff that goes on in our lives. Not this season.

In the past when our team played a team that struggled we did our best not to run rule (if one team scores too much more than the other team, the game is called) the other team. We felt it was only right for our team and their team to play the full 50 minutes allotted us a game. This season in a different division with teams we haven’t played, or haven’t played in a while, we were not shown the same courtesy. Of the 9 games we have played, we only played one complete game. The other eight games we were run ruled. We had several on our team say it is wrong of the other team to run rule us, to not let us get to play our full 50 minutes...

You have heard it before, not everything is black and white. More often than not, it is more about what we value and what they value. Our value was to go out and have a good time, to play our allotted time and enjoy the time we had together. Many of the teams we played this season, their value was to play at the highest level they could, no matter what that did to the other team… We are not necessarily right, and they are not necessarily wrong, each team valued something differently.

Too often in our lives we call things right and wrong when it is really an issue of values. Someone values something differently than we do. Our knee jerk reaction is to say they are in the wrong, how can they not see things my way… More often than not it’s because they place a different value on it. What arguments or conflicts have you been in recently? If we can take a step back and try to see the situation from a higher vantage point we may find that the argument or the conflict was not so much about who was right and who was wrong, but more about valuing something differently. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there is a right and there is a wrong, but too often we confuse right and wrong with preferences and values. Next time you get into an argument, as hard as this might be, you might try seeing things from a different perspective, you might just find it’s not a right or wrong argument but where you are placing your values…