It’s that time of year where many people will spend more time with family and friends and have more social interactions with co-workers.  This could either be exciting or anxiety inducing – or both.  The holidays have a way of highlighting both the beautiful and the strained, the joy and the grief in our relationships.

With that in mind I thought it would be a good time to share some advice on how to get along with others.

These practices come directly out of the life of our church and I think they could be incredibly helpful for anyone, any family, or any organization.  Differences are often divisive and often the more different two people or two groups of people are the harder time they have getting along and enjoying each other’s company.  The opposite is also true – the more similar that two people or two groups of people are, the easier it will be for them to get along and enjoy each other’s company.  At our church though, we have found a way to hold people together in loving community despite an incredible array of differences.  In our small community there are polar differences in levels of education, life experience, personality, race, gender, age, theology, political ideology and affiliation, and economic situation.

This is probably WAY more potentially divisive differences than you’ll encounter at your family get-togethers or office parties.

You could easily assume that the social environment among these very different people is full of landmines that are carefully avoided through polite and superficial relationships, but that isn’t how things are at all.  These people really talk to each other and really love and care about each other. It’s beautiful!

So how does this happen?

Below I’ll post what we call our eight “Practices in our Life Together” and these can all be pretty easily adapted to almost any social environment, but first I need to point out the most important thing in cultivating unity in diversity that isn’t on the list.  You have to have something bigger than all your differences that you all believe in and aspire to.

I don’t know what that would be for your group or family, but for us, our BIG THING is “Jesus is Lord.”  This means that the life and teaching of the Jesus found in scripture is our highest ideal, our greatest aspiration, our ultimate role model, and the thing we are all striving towards.

I don’t know what your BIG THING is or could be, but you need to have one if you are going to find unity and comradely among diversity.  Otherwise we’re all just striving to tolerate each other.

So with that BIG THING in mind, here are our eight “Practices in our Life Together.”  Hopefully you can easily adapt them to your situation.

1. We practice loving each other the way that God loves us.  It is our goal in all of our actions and communications with each other that we communicate the love of God. We practice treating each other the way we would like to be treated – when we are right, when we are wrong, when we are acting out of our brokenness, and when we are acting out of the beauty of Jesus that is in us.
2. We practice giving each other space – space to be wrong, space to be different,  space to believe differently, space to disagree, space to be unlovely, space to be difficult, space to be happy, space to become, space to grow.  We trust God to occupy this space and draw each of us closer to God and work out the things we cannot.  When needed, we use space-giving phrases like, “You could be right.” “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “I recognize your opinion and we can agree to disagree.”
3. We practice taking responsibility for our own actions, attitudes, and happiness.
4. We practice cultivating a generous attitude toward others – giving others the benefit of the doubt. For example, instead of making a negative assumption about someone’s character by saying, “Jane is a jerk!” we might instead say, “Jane is having a hard time being nice right now.”
5. We practice encouraging each other, praying for each other, and setting an example for each other over criticizing each other.
6. We practice active listening and engaging in the work of understanding others.  We recognize the importance of communicating personal things in person.
7. We practice prioritizing HOW we disagree over WHAT we disagree about, knowing that how we disagree often says more about our faithfulness to Jesus than our stance on the particular issue on which we disagree.
8. We practice both forgiveness and setting healthy boundaries.  This means that we forgive each other’s debts easily but sometimes we might find it necessary to adjust the credit score (trust).  This is one of the important ways that we show love and respect both to ourselves and to each other.

I hope this can be a blessing in your life!

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