From Discussion to Dialogue: Learning to Love Enemies

You know, Jesus said love your enemies, and I don't think he was joking around. I think what he meant was love your enemies and may through such love, you learn how to skate backwards better. Love your enemies, and may through such love, you build miraculous structures of praise and love to love. Love your enemies, and may in strange and hostile and lonely places, you find friends. Amen. [01:16:02] (60 seconds)  #LoveYourEnemiesTransform

And I said, I've had just about enough, sir. I never knew if these people were friends of the commodore I worked for, but I just threw caution to the wind. I said, I'm doing the very best I can and I'm good at this and all you can do is just beat me up. I, you know, we need to find a different way to be in relationship. And you know what he said? Who do you work for again? No. He didn't say that. What he said was, you're absolutely right. Can we start over? [01:12:16] (38 seconds)  #CanWeStartOver

And 14 of those 16 times, Ezer refers to who? It's almost like God said, I'm gonna make him a god to be around him. The women here should be like, finally. Somebody gets it right. Hey, it's a dialogue. We both are. Right? Isn't that what one twenty seven said? We're both made in the divine image. So dialogue, it's a good idea. Relationship, we're built relationally. Good idea. How does it work in practice though? And this requires some coffee. Good to the last drop. Okay. [01:01:08] (47 seconds)  #MadeInGodsImage

But what I will tell you is that we figured out within about a minute of coming up. And I can tell you this, it wasn't anything that any one of us, certainly not me, could have come up with. Every time I walk into that church building now, I don't see the windows at the corners, I just told you, with the cross shapes in the middle, it was such a beautiful thing. I see the miracle of that moment when everybody gathered around the table, they drew in close. Now the story about the roller skate. [01:04:46] (37 seconds)  #PowerOfCommunity

And here's the thing about why I'm even telling that story is because what makes conflict resolution possible at all, forget the percentages, is dialogue. Dialogue is like the AED of conflict resolution. Right? It can it can turn those failure percentages around, and so digging in to finding out more about what that's all about is a good thing. One of the early things we found out, this was years ago, is it compared dialogue to discussion. Right? We all know about discussion. Right? Let's have a discussion. [00:51:26] (38 seconds)  #DialogueSavesConflict

One of the interesting things about dialogue is we're not only supposed to listen, we're also supposed to share honestly, angrily or in a mean or demeaning way, but to share honestly. I don't know how many church meetings that I've been to where, gosh, if that had happened in the meeting meeting, that would have been one thing. They always happen in the parking lot or somewhere else where we're not all around to hash things out. Sometimes it really is important to share and boy, one day I was on the phone with this guy, his name was Henry Peycho. [01:11:35] (40 seconds)  #HonestSharingMatters

man, that'd be a cool thing to know. Now, on on one hand, like, if I have a heart attack up here, I don't want one of you going, well, 96%. I might as well make it a 100. No. No. No. Give it a try. Give it a try. But here's something that they also said. If there's an AED, and no, I don't know what those letters stand for, but automatic heart device something, and we have one. We have one right right back there. If you can get an AED on the person within two minutes, you got a 96% chance of saving them. [00:50:22] (33 seconds)  #UseTheAED

Remember in the first creation story, God made male and female in God's image, not one or the other. There was a there was a relational reality there that the second story tries to capture, but it gives you a hint. I'm a word study wonk. And so I wanted to I wanted to look into this. Ezer is the Hebrew word for helper. It shows up oddly enough, by the way, it's already been used twice already in Genesis, but it shows up, are you ready for this, 16 more times in the Hebrew Bible. [01:00:35] (34 seconds)  #EzerTheHelper