Point Of ViewSample

A Recovering Right-Aholic

Over the course of a fifteen-year career in broadcasting, the muscle of preparing an argument or a perspective on a topic was what refined my argumentative skill, especially during that ten-year debate that I had found myself in at The View. I could call myself, and have called myself, a recovering right-aholic. 

I needed and loved and thrived on being right for a very long time. In my personal life, training to be right started early—right answers on tests, right study habits, right decisions after school, right course selection to get into the right college to have the right path. Professionally, I spent a decade and a half needing to be really right Monday through Friday each week on live television. Being right was what I was trained to do and what I needed to do. But all that emphasis on being right came with a cost—because people have value. We can be very right on an issue and very wrong with a person. 

I am pretty sure that we are not going to enter into the gates of heaven with God greeting us saying, “Child, I am so proud of you. Look at how right you were.” I am more confident that God desires for us to experience the joy of being right with one another, not more right than another, and that He is asking for where we stand on issues to be way less important and sacred than the God we stand under together. 

Being right does not guarantee that we feel joy. I think we can all be honest and say that we wish we had been a little more wrong—wrong enough to make things right with a sister, a brother, a friend, a husband, a daughter, or a son. What would it look like to be less right about whatever the issue was and be more right with the other person? Find a teacher who points you to being right with people. Then implement the strategy. Over the past decade, I have learned that working hard at making the point has proven much less fulfilling than pointing to the Maker. 

Think about a person you are less right with because you have been so right about a position or political issue. What is one step you could take toward being right with the person even though you don’t agree?