I used to think I needed to pick sides,
but now I know it’s better to pick a fight.
I picked a fight with a guy named Dale in the seventh grade. He was huge. He almost blocked the sun when he walked by. I didn’t like Dale because he was a bully and beat up the little guys. I’m not sure why he didn’t like me. I didn’t have good looks or a flock of ladies wanting to be my girlfriends. I suppose if acne fomented anger, back then I had enough to start a war. Maybe Dale didn’t like me because I wasn’t a little guy and I wasn’t going to let him push me or anyone else around. Who knows what bullies think, or if they even think? Bullies are people who use conflict as a means for obtaining power. Some young people grow out of this; others don’t and become old bullies.
It was pretty easy to pick a fight with Dale. I told him one day when he was beating up another kid that I wasn’t going to let him keep doing it. Seriously, in the middle of the romping, I stepped forward from the small crowd that had gathered and said, “Dale, I’m calling you out.” That’s junior high–speak for “let’s have a fistfight.”
He spun around slowly with an evil grin on his face, the kind that hungry giants make in the storybooks. He was delighted to have his next victim step forward so willingly. Like we were finalizing some business transaction, we picked the date and time for the fight. A few days later, we went to the cul-de-sac by the school where they were building track homes. A large throng of kids followed. There weren’t many fistfights at my school and this was before talk shows turned violent, so this was big news, almost equal to the yearbooks arriving or a snow day, which in California is a big deal.
We started our fight with a lot of pushing and shoving and tough talk. Then we slugged each other for a while and traded headlocks. By the time a teacher came over to break it up, Dale was covered in blood. Nobody realized all of it was mine, so I declared myself the winner and we both got suspended for a couple of days. Here’s an important thing to note. If you’re going to schedule a fight with a bully and risk getting suspended from school, always pick a fight on a Thursday. That way, you get a long weekend out of the deal.
My parents weren’t too thrilled by the whole ordeal. Actually, Mom shook her head and said she was very disappointed in me. Dad pretended to enforce her scolding while winking and giving me air high fives behind her back. (Now that I’m an adult, I totally get this, by the way.) Once I had explained my just cause fighting for the helpless, I talked myself out of being grounded for the weekend. And by Monday, Dale and I were back at school exchanging gunslinger stares as we passed each other in the hallways. I was ready to move on—I had lost enough blood. I guess for people who slug people, guys like Dale and maybe some folks you know, they rarely if ever get anything resolved. It’s not about resolution for them. It’s about fighting.
That fight with Dale, looking back on it, shows me something about my own hardwiring. I got into and graduated from law school idealistic and ready to help people resolve their disputes. I guess I’m driven by the same need to stand up for the little guy but without using my fists. Jesus talked a lot about disputes, and I am surprised He never said not to have them. I suppose that’s because He knew disputes would somehow be inevitable. What Jesus commented on, though, is a small list of things worth having a fight about. Jesus also talked about how to resolve disputes. He had been the center of quite a few of them, so He would know. He’s still been the subject of countless disputes since He was killed. Even death and resurrection don’t solve some things, I guess.
While I didn’t think I could resolve disputes as well as Jesus, I figured that I could learn from what He said about them. I liked the part where He said that His followers should just find the person with the least credentials to decide the biggest disputes among them. It sounded crazy to me at first, because I’d want to find the smartest person or the most important person or the most powerful person to resolve a disagreement for me. Jesus thought, however, that the least would bring the most to the table. He said that’s how His reverse economy worked. I thought it still might work that way, so I decided to give it a try.
Just out of law school, I figured I had all of the qualifications Jesus talked about for helping people with their fights because I was nobody in particular, I was broke, and I didn’t have any power or credentials. So I opened up what I called the Christian Mediation Service. I know, catchy name, right? Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed about it now when I look back. But my heart was in the right place as a brand-new lawyer, and I wanted to use my legal education to make a difference.
The first two Christians who came through the door had a dispute that, in a few minutes it was obvious, ran incredibly deep between them. A few minutes more and I figured out that they really hated each other’s guts. It wasn’t ordinary hate either—it was the kind they make scary movies about. I met them over and over again, and I tried everything I could think of to get them to bridge the huge fissure that divided them. Their hatred for each other came with an unparalleled passion, a hatred so vile that it took my family getting me an incontinent poodle named Riley as a pet to experience it firsthand.
Through our sessions, I determined that these guys were more interested in inflicting pain on each other through the legal system than actually resolving their disputes. All the talk about resolving conflicts using concepts the Bible talked about—things like love, forgiveness, and self-reflection—were just so many words to these guys. Sure, they had all the Christian phrases. On more than one occasion I even heard them belt out Scripture verses at each other like machine-gun fire. What they lacked was the heart of Jesus, which is the lynchpin to resolving anything. Everything else having failed, I considered inviting them to slug it out like Dale and I had. And that’s exactly what I did.
I rented a boxing ring, hired a referee, and got two sets of headgear and gloves. It cost me thirty-five bucks I didn’t have, but I was so tired of these guys and their Christianese, I’d take on the winner if they wanted. Heck, I’d take them both on. I called the two guys and gave them the date, time, and place where the boxing ring was and said I’d meet them there and we could settle things once and for all.
When I first started following Jesus I wondered what Christians did when they had disputes. Did they even have disputes anymore? I wasn’t sure. After a while, though, I realized that people who loved God had disputes just like everyone else. Some people acted religious about it, and they seemed to get even more religious the bigger the dispute was. The religious people also seemed to carry on their disputes remotely and surrounded the dispute with so many twenty-pound Christian words that it was hard to figure out what they were originally mad about, much less resolve anything. Lots of them had to do with what the religious people thought Christians were supposed to be for or against. What struck me as ironic is that the Bible talked about us being like dust or vapor or like other insignificant things. Yet these folks spoke like they were the ones who had made the mountains when it came to how someone else should act. It wasn’t infrequent that one of the religious people would accuse the other person of “backsliding,” Christian-speak that basically means the other person doesn’t act religious enough. I always thought that was a bad choice of words actually, because it made it sound fun, kind of like ice blocking.
I get why people don’t want to go hand-to-hand with the depth of kindness Jesus found common. I get why it’s easier to just say what sounds like the right stuff from inside a bunker. The problem is, the Bible said the only weapon any of us really has is love. But it’s love like a sword without a handle and because of that, sometimes we’ll get cut when we pick it up. It’s supposed to be close contact, though. Love always is that way. I don’t think Bible verses were meant to be thrown like grenades at each other. They were meant for us to use to point each other toward love and grace and invite us into something much bigger.
All of us want to deal with issues from a safe distance. I know I do. But the stakes couldn’t be higher with the small conflicts. If we don’t get those right, when its game day for big disputes, we’ll still be wrapped around the axle with all of the previous unresolved disagreements. That’s what was happening to these two guys.
When the day came for the two guys to resolve things in the boxing ring, I was sitting on the edge of the canvas with my sweats and tennis shoes on. I even put a towel around my neck because I saw it on a Rocky movie once. I was looking forward to finally resolving this argument, even if it required stitches. Almost predictably, though, neither of the guys showed up, and I never heard from them again.
I still spend a great deal of my professional life resolving conflicts for others. Some people talk about wanting to resolve their conflicts, but more often, they really have a secret, sometimes subconscious agenda to keep the fight going. The trick is figuring out what’s really underneath. Are they all Christianese and just looking to swap big Christian words like knives? Or do they want to model what Jesus said, risk being wronged, and through that, experience just how big God is?
There’s a character in the Bible named Joshua. Over and over God told Joshua and his posse to be strong and courageous. God doesn’t say in the Bible that we’re supposed to man up, or dance around the fire naked and tell manly stories. Instead, we’re just supposed to be strong and courageous. That’s it. The way I read it, it sounds an awful lot like God is calling us out and telling us to pick a fight.
As Joshua was about to enter the land God promised him, he met an angel with his sword drawn in front of him. Joshua must have had some lawyer in him because he asked the angelic warrior something I would ask: “Whose side are you on?” No doubt, Joshua was hoping that the angelic warrior was for them. That’s what I’d hope for. I love the warrior’s answer to Joshua’s question. It was simple: “Neither. Take off your shoes.” The angel wasn’t interested in picking sides; he wanted them to pick God. The angel told them to take off their shoes because they were on holy ground, just as we are today. Perhaps God doesn’t want us spending our time picking sides or teams and trying on jerseys either. He wants us to pick a fight, and He also wants us to pick Him.
I want to pick a fight because I want someone else’s suffering to matter more to me. I want to slug it out where I can make a meaningful difference. God says He wants us to battle injustice, to look out for orphans and widows, to give sacrificially. And anyone who gets distracted with the minutiae of this point or that opinion is tagging out of the real skirmish. God wants us to get some skin in the game and to help make a tangible difference.
I can’t make a real need matter to me by listening to the story, visiting the website, collecting information, or wearing the bracelet about it. I need to pick the fight myself, to call it out just like I called Dale out. Then, most important of all, I need to run barefoot toward it. But I want to go barefoot because it’s holy ground; I want to be running because time is short and none of us has as much runway as we think we do; and I want it to be a fight because that’s where we can make a difference. That’s what love does.
Sure, it’s easier to pick an opinion than it is to pick a fight. It’s also easier to pick an organization or a jersey and identify with a fight than it is to actually go pick one, to commit to it, to call it out and take a swing. Picking a fight isn’t neat either. It’s messy, it’s time consuming, it’s painful, and it’s costly. It sounds an awful lot like the kind fight Jesus took on for us when He called out death for us and won.