Giving Up Your Strength

I went to my first team tennis match yesterday. My wife plays on a team, and she's really good. I don't think I had ever seen her play in that context. I'd seen her at practice, but to actually watch an entire match was something new.

Now I know next to nothing about tennis. Most of what I know comes from playing Nintendo's Wii Tennis with my boys and from watching ESPN's SportsCenter highlights. But I knew she was playing doubles with a partner. And I have watched enough sports to tell when a team's tactics change. Somewhere towards the end of the first set my wife and her partner changed tactics. I couldn't tell exactly what was going on, but suddenly she wasn't hitting the ball very hard. Even her serves - her main strength - didn't have the fiery speed that they had earlier in the set. The ball started arcing over the net instead of coming over quickly. It didn't seem to matter. She and her partner won the match.

I asked about it in the car on the way home. She said, "Well, when I was hitting them hard I noticed that my opponent really liked that. She would return the ball just as hard and it was tougher to get the point. My partner and I decided that since that was her strength, we would take away that strength by taking away some of our own. I hate those slow lob shots and we figured our opponents would too. It took them right out of their game."

Now there's an interesting thought: the idea that by sacrificing a strength an opponent is confounded and taken out of their game. I think there's a lesson there that all of us could benefit from. Sometimes the best way to win in a situation is to weaken what may be a strength. We see this with sports teams, we see it in choirs and musical ensembles, and we do it with our kids. If the same excellent soprano gets all of the solos, the entirety of the choir is weakened because no one else gets the chance to shine. It would be far more efficient to do things for our kids, but the family is weakened if they don't get the opportunity to try, fail, and grow through that learning process.

The same is true in the "team" that we are in as a society. Unfortunately, sometimes our culture puts too much of a premium on winning. We like to win at things. We want to win the argument, we want to be the superior thinker, the superior race, the superior whatever. But often being the strongest means weakening the whole. If someone is trying to win an argument with you and you argue back just as strongly, which is better - to win at any cost or to disengage before a relationship is broken?

There are times when we must stand on principle, and I believe that we should all work hard to determine and clearly define those principles. I don't for one moment advocate sacrificing a principle, but I believe that there are times when it is better for a relationship to not pound someone over the head with how right we are.

The apostle Paul wrote that "a soft answer turns away wrath." It's a good thing to remember. Sometimes sacrificing our strength is simply an act of kindness. Other times it's a way to end a confrontation that is escalating. And what kinder way is there to "take someone out of their game" and confound their anger than to simply be kind enough to change your own game?