“Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive. Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In my Bible app (I use the YouVersion Bible App which is absolutely worth using if you don’t already have one you like), one of the features is that it allows you to make and save notes about individual verses. Once you have done that, it puts a little blue box around the verse number. This probably won’t surprise you, but I don’t remember every verse I’ve ever written on over the years. I’ve made hundreds of notes in the app and written about many more verses directly on here. Much of my writing, though, comes out of notes I have made on the app. It’s always at least a little interesting when in looking for a verse that captures the heart of something I’m going to write about, I find that it has already served that purpose in the past. That happened this morning as I sat down to write. And appropriately enough, the theme I was writing about a year and a half ago is about the same theme we’re going to talk about today which happens to be conflict resolution. Then it was through the lens of Despicable Me 4. Today it’s through the lens of a great new movie called Green and Gold and yet another episode of Abbott Elementary.

I didn’t mean for Abbott Elementary to get the focus of yet another post, but it just keeps furnishing so much content in the way it keeps addressing the various issues it touches on. Most of them – including this one – are examples of what not to do, but as it demonstrated a couple of weeks ago, it occasionally gets things right. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

Last night I finished watching a movie called Green and Gold. Craig T. Nelson was about the only actor in it that I recognized from anything else. Brendan Sklenar from 1923 also played a small but significant role in the story. The movie is about a small Wisconsin dairy farmer (Nelson) trying to save his farm from being foreclosed on by the bank in 1994. The title comes from the fact that Nelson makes a bet with his banker that will allow him to have an extra year to pay off his loan if the Packers win the Super Bowl that year. They lost that year to the Cowboys in the NFC Divisional Round (and, ironically enough, the following year as well). Really, though, it’s about his struggles to love and support his granddaughter (Madison Lawlor) who is a supremely talented singer.

More than that, it’s about family and loving the land and resolving a conflict of vision that is mostly shared, but looks very different because it is being filtered through two different lenses. The short version is that the granddaughter (Jenny) has a real gift (Natalie Nicholes does the actual singing and has a tremendous voice) and wants to be able to use it. Meanwhile, Nelson (Buck) wants her to take over the farming operation when he can’t do it anymore. Complicating things is that his daughter, Jenny’s mom, was a singer as well who ran off in pursuit of her dreams, lost her way, and eventually lost her life because of it. Jenny was one of the results of her mom’s drifting from a good path, but Buck is still mourning her loss and is terrified of the same thing happening to Jenny.

Jenny is talented enough that an opportunity comes along for her to potentially earn some real money that she plans to pour back into the farm in order to help keep it solvent, which she pursues over Buck’s resolute rejection of it. He wants to keep her grounded, but in trying to keep her close, he risks pushing her away just exactly like he did with her mom. Ultimately the opportunity doesn’t pan out. More to the point, Jenny rejects it when she realizes that the people offering it never really appreciated her, but only her songwriting abilities.

The resolution comes right at the tail end of the film, so close that I wish they had given the audience just a bit more time to savor it. And it comes in a moment that is an obvious nod to the resolution of Field of Dreams in both story and cinematography. Honestly, it brought tears to my eyes it was handled so well. But the payoff came because the characters finally embraced Paul’s counsel here to the Colossian church. Significantly, the genuine, humble faith of the family played a significant role throughout the movie.

Buck finally showed a bit of compassion and humility as he recognized that Jenny wasn’t in danger of losing her way. Jenny, for her part, finally recognized Buck’s passion and resistance as the love for her that it was, and an attempt at gentleness. And although it wasn’t stated outright, the two clearly forgave each other for the hurtful words they threw at one another along the way. It was their love for the Lord, for each other, and for the land itself and the way of life they both cherished that made the resolution possible. It really was a film worth watching. If you have access to Angel Studios, it would be worth your time.

Meanwhile, over at Abbott Elementary, Gregory and Janine are trying to plan their first couple’s vacation. Remember that the couple made the big decision to move in together a few episodes ago (I complained about that one here). And now that they are playing house together in spite of not having the covenant of marriage to actually hold them together, they are trying to do married people things like going on vacation together. At the start of the episode they are happily working together to decide on a location. They finally opt for the Outer Banks. That’s where things fall apart.

Getting to the Outer Banks from Philadelphia is not a short trip. But the drive would be a pretty one. Gregory wants to make the drive. Janine does not. She’d rather buy plane tickets. He is resolutely opposed to “wasting” money on something like that. Not to take sides as I really do love air travel, but as a resident of the state where they are planning to go, I couldn’t help thinking that even if they flew, the closest they were going to be able to land was probably Raleigh from which point they would still have a several hours drive. They could potentially fly to Wilmington, but even then, depending on where in the Outer Banks they were going, there was still going to be a lot of time spent on the road. Flying would also necessitate a car rental, adding a fairly big chunk of change to the cost of the trip. In short, although Janine really didn’t want to “waste time” driving, the total time involved in taking that approach would actually wind up longer than driving would take. I don’t think the writers of the episode did their homework very well.

In any event, stuck on either side of this divide, the pair start working to come up with a compromise. Gregory offers the first one. Instead of going all the way to the Outer Banks, they can just go to Atlantic City. It’s still a beach, and it’s only an hour and a half drive. Perfect. Except Janine really wants to go to the Outer Banks. Her turn. Because the issue for Gregory is the cost of the plane tickets, she just goes ahead and purchases them with her money, so that none of his has to go to that. Of course, the fact that she has her money and he has his money is a whole other problem with their living situation, but I will resist the temptation to hop on my soapbox about that right now. For Gregory, though, he was thinking more in terms of their money, and this move on Janine’s part just infuriates him more.

In the end, they remain just as intractably divided as they were at the start of the second act. Neither is really willing to compromise at all. Neither has the humility or kindness or patience to give up what they want in favor of the other. Their version of a compromise is to grab for what they want, but in a way that seems to them like it will throw a bone to the other. Neither is willing to demonstrate the compassion or gentleness to actually listen to why the other wants the travel method they have expressed a preference for. You get the sense from the episode that Gregory has a reason beyond money that he doesn’t want to fly, but that’s never mentioned. They both express their love for each other, but they aren’t willing to actually do the hard work that love sometimes requires. As a result, by the end of the episode, they have broken up.

What that is going to mean for the apartment lease they have co-signed remains to be seen, but that’s one of the risks of getting sexually involved and moving in with somebody instead of actually getting married. Of course, the season isn’t over, and I strongly suspect that next week’s episode is going to see them work things out, but the contrast between the two stories and their approach to conflict resolution was notable all the same.

If you have an ongoing conflict in your life, resolving it is going to take some work. It is going to take some sacrifices on your part. You will have to walk a path of humility and kindness. You will need to work to have compassion for and patience with the other person. If they ultimately refuse to do what they need to do on their side of things to bring things to a harmonious resolution, you are going to have to be willing to forgive them and move on from whatever it is to avoid getting hopelessly entangled in the bitterness it will inevitably build up in your heart if you hang onto it. And, of course, the whole process here has to be thoroughly marinated in love, or it isn’t going to get off the ground in the first place. None of this is easy, but it is worth it in the end. Thankfully, Hollywood can still point us toward what’s true even if that happens to come through a bad example.