Take One for the Team

Sometimes I find that it's so much easier if I just take one for the team.  My husband has a shirt with that saying right on it, and he likes to kid that sometimes he does things just so that our team (he & I) don't have a problem, even if he didn't want to do it in the first place.  I finally have come to see how this applies to my life.

Without going into detail about my own experience (because, after all, I said I wasn't going to write about my life in detail in this blog), I'll give you a broad idea of the situation.  I found myself being scolded along with another individual in order to prove a point to that other individual about something s/he did wrong.  After the meeting, the person who gave the scolding proceeded to tell me that I had not been in the wrong but that s/he wanted the other person (who had been in the wrong) to hear the same words spoken to both of us.  Ok, so I really don't agree with this approach, personally, but I knew what s/he was up to when the scolding was initiated.  Hence, I took one for the team.  I don't believe that it helped the other person to see that s/he was in the wrong, but who am I to question the scolder's methods?

This ties in pretty well with the post I wrote the other day regarding letting others receive credit for your ideas.  Did I hurt me to have this scolding?  No, not particularly, since I knew I wasn't in the wrong.  Did it potentially help the other person realize what s/he did was wrong?  Possibly (though again, not my preferred method).  So why not let the scold-deliverer make me take one for the team?

In the long run, there are things we argue about each day, or wrong that we try to right, that are really not important to the big picture of life.  Does it matter that I cooked so you should put away the dishes?  Would it not be better for me to bless you by putting away the dishes so you didn't have to?  Think about this a little.  You may find that you go through life a little less stressed and a little more happy because you didn't sweat the small things and took one for the team.