What if we are doing the best that we can – Tash McGill

What if this is not the worst-case scenario? What if it is the best-case scenario? How would your view of your current circumstances change?

What if every person you encounter is simply doing the best they can with what they have? What if every person who misunderstands you and causes you hurt or frustration is trying as hard as they possibly can to do their best to understand you and meet what you need of them?

We tend to view the world through a filter colored by our emotions, judgments and experiences — we’re self-centered that way.

But the truth is somewhere in between what we perceive is happening and what others perceive is happening. We can access so much more peace in our internal worlds once we learn how to believe that our experience is not necessarily the whole truth.

It also enables us to have more compassion for ourselves and others, as we bump up against one another on this path called Life.

When I was a teenager, I struggled in my relationship with my mother. I communicated my thoughts and feelings a lot, because we’d been taught truth was a high value. In my teenage brain, truth was pretty concrete and didn’t have a lot of
compassion for what my mother was going through, the experiences that shaped how she was able to parent me and respond to my communication. We had a lot of fights.

What I couldn’t see at the time, was that ours was the best-case scenario. There were things I wanted or wished could be different particularly around the things that seemed to cause the most tension and frustration. Cleaning and chores and rules that seemed to cause more struggle than benefit. Typical teenage stuff but in our home, it seemed to be a battlefield.

A single mother of three, she was working full-time, trying to give us the best education she could while dealing with little financial support from my dad and her own loneliness. She felt judged for her divorce and how her life had changed after that. She no longer attended church because she felt like she didn’t belong or was understood. Her frustration came out quickly but as I’ve learned to hear more of her story, I now understand she was doing the best she could. Yeah, there were times it got pretty bad. But it was the very best-case scenario.

When someone gets angry with me now, I remind myself firstly they are coming from a place I don’t understand. Perhaps they are angry because I failed to meet an expectation they had of me or because I’ve somehow stepped on a place in their
lives where they are ‘doing the best they can’. Those places in our lives are both the hardest and the best places and where our weakness and stress points are most obvious.

The sooner I realize that and shift gears, the sooner I am able to step into compassion and look for understanding that can draw us back together instead of pushing us apart.

When we think the worst of people and assume the worst, we start to live in isolated defensiveness. It’s only in compassion and assuming people are doing the best they can, we have the capacity to draw closer together.

I believe that’s why we never see Jesus issue judgement on anyone but the Pharisees and Sadducees. He knows the woman at the well, Martha, Peter and Thomas the Doubter are all doing the best they can. In fact, he teaches adamantly against judgement because it would be impossible for any of us to find our own behaviour without fault enough to qualify to judge others.

Removing judgement is key to how we might live in peace with one another and peace with ourselves. Sometimes we need permission to remind ourselves that we are doing the best we can.

Tash McGill

Tash is a former minister who works as a strategist and writer. She helps companies, not for profit, and ministry organisations use design thinking and collaboration strategies to achieve better outcomes. She is also the wonderful person who suggested I start a blog. Thanks Tash.

You can find out more about Tash at tashmcgill.com 

Alvan Nee

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