Weird…it has to rank up there among the strangest phone calls I’ve ever fielded.
I’m the chaplain for the State College Spikes, the short-A minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Basically that means that I’m their pastor. We’ve had a great summer of chapel, with as many as 18 young men showing up for a Bible study/small group on Sunday afternoons before their game. I’ve been trying to build relationships with them, and lately I’ve been sending them text messages after the games.
My phone rang shortly after I sent a text tonight inviting them to breakfast tomorrow morning. My caller id said that it was Josh, so I said, “Hey Josh, what’s up?” The crusty old-guy voice on the other end of the line wanted to know who the h-e-double hockey sticks I was and how I got his number.
Being the sharp guy that I am, I immediately sensed that it wasn’t Josh, and that I must have entered his phone number incorrectly in my contacts. In my defense, Josh has pretty poor penmanship. I guess they don’t teach penmanship at Fresno State.
After a few minutes of explanation, the guy in California softened his tone. He said that he’d been deleting my messages, but he’d had enough, and wanted to get to the bottom of things and find out why I was sending him messages. I explained again that I was the pastor for this minor league team, and that I was trying to send a text to a kid from California. I apologized up and down, and after a while he seemed to understand the mistake. When I told him who I was trying to text, he even said that he was a Fresno State fan. He laughed, saying that he’d never talked to anyone in PA before.
The experience, while a little funny to me, made me go back over some tips on conflict resolution.
1. Don’t assume that the person who is annoying you is doing so intentionally. It could be an honest mistake.
2. When the grievance starts, deal with it. Letting it get under your skin and build up momentum is called gunnysacking–keeping all the frustration pent up is bad, and when it boils over, it can get unnecessarily emotional.
3. Do your best not to swear at the other person. Especially if that person is me.
4. Outline the problem, ask clarifying questions, and look for a way to eliminate the annoyance. Deleting my texts without letting me know that I was sending them to the wrong person didn’t help.
5. Offer grace. It’s only a matter of time before you’re going to want/need grace, so why not treat people how you want to be treated?
At the end of the evening, I have a funny story to tell, and a house full of family who love me. The Spikes won in 10 innings tonight, and 3 of my chapel guys got named to the NY-Penn League all-star team. Overall, not a bad night. Here are a couple of today’s pics.
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