Life lessons from the men's room

This is going to sound weird, especially since I'm writing this on a church blog, but I had a realization about conflict management in the men's restroom today.

Yes...brace yourselves.

Today I was followed into the men's room by a worker doing maintenance in the church into the men's room, where I knew that one of the urinals had broken yesterday and spewed water out onto the entire bathroom floor and almost into the hallways. My initial thoughts went straight to another half hour of John, Cindy and me with mops trying to maintain the mess. The problem came, however, when I realized that it's just not cool to talk to another man in the bathroom. It's just this weird etiquette thing that goes on...but who understands guys anyways. How was I going to make sure this guy didn't cause another waterfall that would lead to more wasted time, more damage, and more of a headache for the staff.

In this brief 5 second span I had a light go off in my head. Speaking of men's room etitquette, you are not allowed to use the urinal next to another person, unless every other one is filled up. I acted fast to grab a strategically placed urinal next to the broken one so that the man would surely use facilities two spots away from me. Success!!!

I like to count myself a creative person, but for whatever reason this simple knowledge of bizzare men's rules, I believe helped me avoid a conflict today, not necessarily between the man and I, but between me and the mop. I suppose I could have sucked up my pride and just told the man, but that would have broken "the code."

I wonder what other kind of dilemmas we could avoid with a little creative thinking. I might also, in a Wesleyan quadrilateral kind of way, call it our reason. We just finished a Sunday talking about "open minds" in our faith, how God gave us intellect for a purpose, and too often we just turn that off. Opening minds also involves compassion, and sometimes creativity. Do you think the man would have appreciated me telling him what urinal to use, despite the circumstances? I don't think he wanted me thinking about him period.

I was shown a clip of a movie, "Inherit the Wind" today by our senior pastor, who has a flash of brilliance every now and then, where Spencer Tracy's character is the prosecuter in the Scope's Monkey Trials. The jist of his argument comes down that he is not destroying The Bible or anyone's faith, but that reason can enhance one's faith and get you not only out of jams, but make your faith more valid, more inspiring and more real.

I'll never forget reading the book "The Sacred Canopy" by Peter Berger, in which for the first time I realized that not everyone thinks like me, not everyone has had the experiences I have had, and that it's really, really difficult for me to make blanket statements about God's experiences with humanity that are true for all people. But luckily there is a different urinal to guide people to. Luckily, we can be creative in our experiences and be intelligent in our evangelism to not simply go for the "yes/no, right/wrong, black/white" type of faith, but we can present a faith of thinking Christians who are not afraid of challenging each other to seek more right and more truth in God, rather than just settle on what someone has told them.

Creative reasoning seems to be a lost art, and I really feel that it would get us out of more and more situations in which someone can get hurt by the Church because we are too set in our "codes" to help people not use the broken urinal.