Rivals

How often do you compare the best of your group to the best of another group? Probably not often. Because we have an unhealthy tendency to use the best example of the group, team, school, tribe, company we consider our own with the worst example from the other group, team, school, tribe.What would it do to our antagonism, our dismissiveness, our hate for the other tribe if we reversed this? Let’s take the worst example of “us” and compare it to the best example of “them”. Quickly we’d see the futility in this exercise. Why? Because we compare for the sake of feeling good about ourselves. It’s counterintuitive to intentionally reverse that outcome. It exposes that our goal is superiority, not objective comparison.And it hurts our connections, builds walls, fuels rivalry, and perpetuates false narratives. Stop doing it.Jesus practiced this counterintuitive reversal to expose unfair comparisons and unhealthy superiority when he told a story about the best example from another tribe*—a hated group, really. Go ahead and re-read it with this in mind.*The Parable of the Good Samaritan