Why I Love This Stuff

Why do I love working as a mediator?  It's not really a new line of work.  As a pastor I've done parts of this task for decades.  I loved the same things thirty-five years ago that I love now.

I love to engage people in processes that make them think deeply, feel fully and engage authentically.  I've never been a small talk person.  I don't really know how to do it, and I've never been very good at it.  But give me a real conversation with some transparency, some honest give and take, some learning and growing--and I'm there one thousand percent.

When I can walk with people through a conflict, I feel the genuine energy of that process.  It may be difficult, painful, and even volatile.  But it's real.  And it has the potential for growth and sometimes even for transformation.  Mediation is some of the most creative and hopeful work I've very done.

I am generally a high-hope person.  So I am thrilled when people discover that they can actually do some about an apparently hopeless and intractable situation.  Nearly every parenting plan mediation I have facilitated begins with one or both parties saying, "Thanks for the effort today.  But, you know, this isn't going to work.  We haven't been able to agree on anything so far.  I can't imagine why today would be any different."

As likely as not, we walk out of such sessions with a full parenting plan.  That plan is a blueprint for life in the future--at least the future as co-parents.  People who saw themselves as helpless and hopeless when they came in walk out not only with a plan but with an increased sense of themselves as people of value and capability.  I can't get enough of that kind of experience.

As a high-hope person, I get a rush when new pathways to the future are created.  Mediation is a creative process that engages the imagination of all the participants.  No one can ever predict the results of an effective mediation process.  It's the easiest thing in the world to take a template, a piece of boilerplate text and fill in the names and dates.  If that's what mediation was, I would run screaming in the other direction.

But in the mediation process, people discover solutions to problems that no one could have foreseen.  There is something mysterious in this creative process.  We Christians would call it the work of the Holy Spirit.  It is insight, ideas and options that seem to come from outside of the participants.  It is synergy and risk-taking that produce something new.  I get to be a steward of the "third side"--the safe space where such creative efforts can bear fruit.  It is beautiful to see when it happens.  And when it does, my feet barely touch the ground as I go home.

Most of all, I love to be part of conflict that is productive.  Conflict is inevitable.  Combat may seem to be just as foreordained in the high conflict situations I often facilitate.  But it is out of such high conflicts that some of the most creative solutions arise.  When parties have vented and gotten out their most basic feelings, fears and frustrations, then the road is cleared for some real movement forward.  Conflict is not bad in itself.  In fact, it is produces progress, it can be a vehicle for real hope.

I love to be one of the people who helps to make that happen.  I hope that I will be allowed to do even more of it--and perhaps with you!