It’s time for us to be united again
- Kyle Snyder: Live on Purpose
- September 15, 2019
- 1139
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success.” — Henry Ford.
We live in an age where individuality is celebrated as something good, and that is great. We all have the right to be who God made us to be. I know I don’t want to be who I am not. That takes way too much work.
When we are going into a new situation with people we are meeting for the first time, we need to be ourselves. If people don’t like us for who we are, it won’t do any good to try and live up to their expectations. We need to just be ourselves and trust God that he will bring the right people to our lives.
Although, on the other hand, in this world we need to get along with other people. Let’s take working as an example. Most people have to work alongside of another person. If we can get along with them, we will be as successful as we can be. It takes teamwork to pull off something big. If we can’t work together with anyone, nothing will get done.
We don’t have to agree on everything. In fact, when working with others, we might only agree on the fact that a job needs to be done. We might not even agree on how to do the job. However, the job needs to be done, so we must meet in the middle.
It takes the bigger person to meet in the middle and work with a person who doesn’t want to give in, just to get the job done. Some people can be difficult to work with. They just want to be difficult because they can. It has nothing to do with us. To them life is just one big game. They never want to bend.
We just need to look and see if it is worth getting into a fight with them over or not. If it is dangerous or the job will not be done right, we should not hesitate to speak up and push back in a nice way. However, if it can be done right and safely, sometimes it is just easier to do it their way.
I used to work with a man who had to have everything his way. If it was not his way or by the book, he acted like the world was coming to an end. There was no middle ground with him. It was his way or no way. He made the lives of the people around him difficult by demanding perfection from everyone. When you did a job, he had no problem telling you what needed to be done, but if you did it to him, watch out. He got mad.
One day we had a little disagreement, and I said, “We will have to agree to disagree.”
“No,” he said to me. I thought about it for a little while and decided it was pretty sad he couldn’t even agree to disagree.
We have to put our pride aside sometimes and make peace with each other. The Bible tells us it is good when brothers are united. Our fellow man is our brother, and somethings are better left alone. We are not going to see eye to eye with other people all the time, but if we can learn to value other people’s opinions on the same level as our own, we will be better off in the long run.
How do we do that? We should be able to see other people have something to bring to the table, just as we do. Our opinion can’t be right all of the time. Maybe the person we overlooked had the best idea about how to get something done.
Next time a big job needs to be done, get a few ideas from different people. Having more than one idea will increase the odds of success. Sometimes we can pick the best parts of different ideas and marry them to make a fantastic idea. We can’t do this alone. We must be united if we are going to have the best chance at success.