What is common ground and why do we need to cultivate it?

Finding common ground never means having to surrender the ground where you feel you must stand based upon principle.

It is finding and recognizing the ground you share that overlaps the irreducible minimums of core beliefs.

More so, it is recognizing and respecting the human beings who share that ground and finding language to communicate commonalities as well as uniqueness.

For the "good-news-ist" (evangelist) it means finding and exercising an opportunity, with integrity, to communicate our good news and listening to the message of the other.

The antithesis is answering questions our neighbor has not asked or assuming presuppositions that they do not hold. Our words fall on deaf ears and interactions create an atmosphere that is opposite of the Kingdom of God.

And Incarnation  ….

Incarnation is and was hard …seeing from everyone's point of view, feeling the pain of all sides, calling forth intercession, glimpsing divine eternal perspective, knowing that others do not and cannot know and feel what you know and feel.

God did it and does it and invites us to share a piece of the action … which depolarizes us and unnerves us and takes away all sorts of safe hiding places where we might retreat.

Jesus had no name that any could understand to define or confine him, so he most often called himself, "Son of Man."

That is incarnation and it calls for identification with all suffering and allows for no comfort zone with which to label oneself.