Pick your battles

 This evening while in prayer it struck me that I ought to share with some young Salesians this advice: Pick your battles. 

With more and more complexities in community life and apostolate, the major hurdle often is lack of communication and discord within the community.  While there is much to be done outside, when there is discord within, there is hardly anything substantial or meaningful achieved elsewhere.  But when there is communion within the community, in spite of and through the internal disagreements and fights, miracles happen! 

In those places where there are people who are well intentioned and hard working, there is also this sort of ego clash that breaks the harmony.  The disagreement is not about the task as such but perhaps about the way of going about. Such and other trivial matters need to be cleverly handled and understood. They are often not the crux of the matter and hence need not - and should not - becomes obstacles for the process of good.  

If the matter is not concerning basic primary principles or values, but only accidentals, one can give in for the greater good rather than fight it out for the trivial matters and miss out doing the greater good.  Hence the need to be prudent to pick one's battles.  Not every battle is to be waged, leave alone won.  Not worth dissipating our energies on the non-essentials.  But if it pertains the core matters of our life and living, and it makes a world of difference to the beneficiaries, then it certainly is worth battling it out.