WHAT'S SO WRONG ABOUT BEING WRONG

If you live long enough you may be one of those lucky people who discover something they’re good at. Maybe it’s even something you can make a living at or it’s how all your friends identify you: “Here comes Mr. Needlepoint man. He’s so Continental.” (If you know needlepoint terms, that joke will leave you in stitches.)

Well, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m not only fortunate to be really, really good at something, but I’m also blessed enough to recognize it. In my lifetime, I’ve become exceedingly good at being wrong. Maybe some of you share this skill.

I’ve been wrong about “the facts.” Legal facts, science-y facts, historic facts, political facts, pop culture facts . . . pretty much across the board.

I’ve been wrong about what I believed. That didn’t stop me from arguing with others until both sides hated each other and neither was converted.

I’ve been wrong about what I feared. 

I’ve been wrong about how I remembered events in my past. 

I’ve been wrong in how I treated others. (Even if I felt justified at the time.)

I’ve been wrong about song lyrics—more than once. (It is “Groose” and not “Bruce” that’s letting you down by the way. I don’t want to rock your world.)

Looking back, I actually may have been wrong more than I’ve been right. I’m sure others could verify that for me. After so much practice, I’ve discovered being wrong is a beautiful thing.

Sure, being wrong sucks when you’re on Wheel and you tell Pat Sajak you’d like to “solve the puzzle,” only to whiff wildly. Then Karen chirps the suddenly obvious answer. “Calm down, Karen. Who do you think bought all those vowels? I gave you that answer-and the trip to Hawaii.” 

But, aside from that, for me being wrong has often been a point of discovery. It’s been the first step in change. It’s been the open door to things I hadn’t considered before, either because I was unwilling or simply couldn’t see it from the blockage in my own intellect.

As a kid, I tried to interpret the Bible literally. God made the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. End of story.

The problem was six days didn’t leave room for dinosaurs (or a lot of other events). So, I felt very threatened by all things “pre-historic.” It became easy to write those scientists and archaeologists off despite abundant visual and scientific evidence.

Then one day it simply occurred to me: Dinosaurs did exist, and they certainly weren’t a surprise to God (or something he was trying to cover up because it didn’t make sense in his narrative). So, if it wasn’t a problem for him, why should it be a problem for me? (If you want to applaud my intellectual courage in acknowledging something that was so painfully clear, you can do so now. We’ll also just skip over the fact that I was willing to deny the existence of dinosaurs but more than OK with the idea that all the animals and people of the world—except unicorns—are here only after they rode on the Love Boat forty days and forty nights with Captain Noah.) In the end, I don’t need God to be who I believe him to be . . . I need to give him the freedom to be who he is.

So, I was wrong.

The result was, it opened an entire world of truth and discovery for me. Not only could I join the twentieth century by way of facts and reality, but I could also stop letting fear stunt my image of God and let the world be so much bigger. That’s the power of being wrong. It’s not about abandoning conviction; it’s about searching (fearlessly) for truth.

Unfortunately, as a culture, we associate being wrong as weakness or retreat (or worse yet, letting the other side win). We’ve become the child closing his eyes and denying the evidence of dinosaurs even as he stands in front of fossils at the Smithsonian.

Because we have so much wrapped up in what we believe, we’re easily threatened by being wrong or shades of gray in the midst of those black and whites. We stop looking for truth altogether in the hopes of only finding supporting evidence for what we already believe.

When we give up on truth, we close off our hearts and minds and become idiots dancing to the flute of our favorite piper. We give into dogma. 

But there’s no adventure in dogma.

For thousands of years, we believed the world was flat. If you got in a boat, put on an eight-track of Styx’s “Come Sail Away” and just let the wind blow . . . eventually you’d fall off the edge of the world. We believed it so concretely that we were willing to kill anyone that said otherwise.

Fear kept us from looking at the evidence. Fear made us sweep the truth under the rug and look the other way. 

The problem was, we were wrong. The world was round. And suddenly this thing we had all sewn up spilled over into something so much bigger and greater than we had known. The universe was more magnificent than we had ever imagined.

I come from a Christian tradition. (Talk about dogmas, we’ve had a few.) The scriptures say you find what you’re looking for. In other words, if you’re bent on keeping an open heart and looking for truth, that’s what you’ll find. If you are searching for the good in someone or something, you’ll see it. But if you’re seeking only supporting evidence for your case against another, then that’s all you will find too.

So, if you believe your boss is the devil and only wants to destroy you, you’ll find never-ending evidence to support your belief.

If you’re locked in a relentless feud with a sibling, everything they say or do will eventually point you to being right and them being wrong—because you’re looking for supporting evidence, not truth.

If you hold to conspiracies and political plots and doctrines with fearfully clenched fists, you will only let in the things that support those beliefs.

Humility is the key: admitting you don’t know everything or have all the answers or at the very least, you’re not always right.

In humility, we can ask what is the truth—without rushing to supply our own answer. 

The result is finding the world and the divine are so much richer and bigger than the little things we’ve made them. It takes courage to be humble. You have to be brave to unclench your fists and sift through the facts to find what is there—even if it disagrees with your stance.

There’s no adventure in dogma, but there is in engagement and conversation and the hunt for the truth. You don’t have to have all the answers or always be right. We’ll like you anyway.

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