It’s really hard to like some people sometimes.
For some reason when I went to training camp back in October 2014 as a fairly new believer, I thought I’d like everyone. I’d never really been around a tight community of believers for long before training camp, but I thought that surely I’d get along with everyone in a group of people who all love Jesus enough to sign up for a trip like this.
Oh boy was I wrong.
On my first team on the Race, I butted heads with one of my teammates, Kyle. We did not like each other, and it wasn’t much of a secret. God created us to be very different people with opposite giftings, and it caused us a lot of grief.
In Romans 12:6-8 it talks about the various different types of gifts given to us through the grace of God. One of those gifts is the gift of teaching and another is mercy. Now the gift of teaching exists in someone who seeks truth above all else. Teachers are passionate about correcting errors and love to study the Bible; however, sometimes teachers focus more on facts than the people involved, making them seem cold or insensitive. The gift of mercy manifests in empathy, compassion and strong focus on relationship. Mercies often tend to take up other’s offenses leading to bitterness and anger, need to be needed, avoid conflict and have heightened sensitivity.
My teammate Kyle has a powerful teaching gift; whereas, I am strong in the gift of mercy. (People can have more than one gifting, as we do, but for the sake of this story, I will focus on these specific giftings.) Since teachers focus more on facts and truth regardless of emotion while mercies focus almost completely on emotion, you can start to see where the two of us clashed. I cried more than Kyle felt comfortable with or understood, and he would say exactly what he was thinking if he thought it to be truth, no matter how others felt about it. He was frustrated that I didn’t understand him and freaked out so much, and I was frustrated with what I thought was insensitivity. I grew to fear talking to him, and he preferred not to talk to someone who might burst into tears at the drop of a hat. Our first team struggled with the concept of honest and daily feedback sessions, and our relationship suffered for it. Our differences set us apart, and gave the enemy room to fill the crack in the body of Christ with lies about one another.
At month 4, we were at different ministries because the nine men on the squad had “manistry” month at one location, and all the women went to another one. Then after month 4 at debrief, our leadership team changed our teams. Both Kyle and I felt relieved to get a second chance to start afresh with new people, but to our secret dismay, we were placed on a team with each other again. We individually decided that our dissonance wouldn’t happen on our new team, and we would somehow get along this time. For the first week of month 5 in Mozambique, we got along easily. I noticed how Kyle was giving an extra effort this time to be more sensitive towards me. However, we had an unresolved history, and just because you end one season, doesn’t mean the problems won’t follow you into the next.
One day Kyle said something that seemed insensitive to me, and old emotions came crashing in with a vengeance. “I will NOT let this happen again,” I decided. Even though mercies, like myself, try to avoid conflict at all costs, I mustered up all the courage I could and told Kyle later that day, “I need to talk to you.” He agreed and we went and sat outside to talk later that day.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Well…,” I said, eyes fixed on my finger tracing shapes in the sand, “It’s no secret that you and I didn’t get along on our last team.”
“No kidding,” he said.
“And I don’t want that to happen again,” I said.
“Neither do I,” he responded.
Encouraged by his agreement, I ripped my eyes from the sand to look up, and he looked sincere. “Right. So. What I need to say is, um, well I don’t know what you did in manistry last month, but you’re different this month. You’ve been more sensitive to me this month, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed. So thank you.”
He nodded.
“However, we never really discussed why we didn’t get along, and I don’t know why I expected it to just disappear. I guess I thought if we ignored it long enough, it’d just dissolve…but it didn’t. You said [this] to me, and my old hurt emotions came back up, and I realized that we needed to talk about this. I refuse to carry our last conflict onto this team. I want to fix it. I just don’t know how.”
He let me finish getting all my thoughts out, and then he asked if he could have some input. I told him it was a discussion, and I wanted to know what he thought about it all. He told me about how his gift of teaching has given him a passion for the truth, which sometimes puts relationships to the side in search for that truth. He explained that teachers tend to clash with mercies, and that I have the highest level of mercy out of anyone he knows. He explained how it was difficult for him to understand me oftentimes because of our extreme differences, and he understood it was probably hard for me to understand him as well, which was true.
Kyle realized I was open to complete honesty in the discussion, and said, “We don’t have to be best friends by the end of this race, but we are on the same team right now. Like Paul said, we are to bear with one another in love.” He quoted a verse from Colossians 3:12. He asked me, “How can we love each other better?”
I tried to think of some ideas, but we decided that by catering to each other’s needs, we wouldn’t be loving each other well. We would learn nothing. God placed us on a team together to learn from each other.
“At home, we wouldn’t get this opportunity to learn from each other,” Kyle said, “because at home, I wouldn’t choose to hang out with someone like you, and I don’t think you’d choose to hang out with someone like me, right?” I nodded, a little shocked at his extreme honesty, but it was true. We’d never voluntarily choose to be around each other. “On the race,” he continued, “we don’t get to pick our teams, so we get this unique opportunity to be on teams with people we wouldn’t normally choose to be around, and that’s good because I can learn a lot from you and you can learn a lot from me too, probably.” I nodded again in sincerity.
“So I don’t think we should cater to one another,” he stated, “I think we need to agree to learn to understand each other better.” One of the biggest agreements we reached, was a point he told me about something his pastor had told him:
“Seek more to understand than to be understood.”
The World Race isn’t about traveling the world with your best friends, and you’re not going to like everyone you’re on a team with. In fact, in life you’re not always going to like everyone you work with, or go to church with, but you have a choice. If your number one priority is to try to make them understand you, things will never get resolved. Building healthy relationships is about “dying to yourself” and “seeking more to understand than to be understood.”
Paul recognized the value of living in harmony with each other in the body of Christ. He writes to the Philippians, “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:1-4)
In the body of Christ, we are called first to love God and second to love others as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39) and live in harmony with others (Romans 12:16). That doesn’t mean Kyle and I pretend to like each other for the sake of what Jesus says; it means we genuinely die to ourselves with our own selfish desires, and try to understand one another daily.
We both chose in. We decided to have the “hard talk,” which terrified me at first but made all the difference. The next month, Kyle said something that would’ve normally upset me, but I automatically knew he was loving me well because he was seeking the truth in the matter so it didn’t bother me. He also realized that what he said could’ve potentially hurt me, and the next time he saw me in passing, I said, “Hey Kyle!” He looked scared as he quickly said, “Hey, Sarah! I love you!” Between the nervous look on his face and the sentence he never says to anyone, the quickly spurted off line took me completely off-guard. I realized that he had thought of what he had said earlier and recognized the potential for it to harm me, and he was trying to make up for it. I erupted into laughter. We had done it! We had both tried to understand the other person’s point of view and loved each other through it, and I couldn’t have been more excited.
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” (Ephesians 4:15-16)
We no longer allow the enemy to separate the body of Christ. We’re not perfect and we’re not always going to get along, but we both know that each of us strives to understand the other. We both know that “when each part [of the body] is working properly, [it] makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” It’s true, I don’t like some people sometimes, but thanks to the grace of God, I’m able to love everyone at all times by dying to myself and loving them like Jesus loves them.
———————————————————————–
Kyle is not yet fully funded, and if you feel led to donate towards his race, please click here: Donate to Kyle. If you want to check out his blog that’s here: Kyle Roetter. Please be praying for donations to come in for him! Thanks!
