Since members of our parish read William Young's The Shack together, many parts of that surprising and sometimes frustrating book have stayed with me. One that stand's out is Young's explanation of rights and relationships. His Creator figure tells us that we humans insist on protecting our rights because we don't know how to get what we need any other way. We're so bad at relationships that we need the structure of rights to keep us from hurting each other. If we really learned how to share in God's love, all those rules would fall away.
Even here in Massachusetts, home to a driving culture that borders on insanity, I notice that drivers do not always take the right of way. We have the rules to keep us safe, the many regulations that tell us who gets to drive on and who has to yield the way. But if heavy traffic or a tricky intersection keeps a person waiting a long time, eventually someone else stops and signals for them to go ahead. Just this morning, three people relinquished the right of way in order to help me, a total stranger, get where I needed to go.
Our relationships thrive when we are willing to be more than fair, to give up what is rightfully ours for the sake of our neighbors.
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