There was a particularly good op-ed commentary in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, by Deborah Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University asking “Why is compromise a dirty word?”

I am not sure where the current feeling that compromise is giving up or selling out came from, but it is a denial of the reality that makes society work.

The first place we learn to compromise is in our family. Anyone who has grown up with brothers and sisters learned to compromise to survive. Spoiled children who had to get their way or they wouldn’t play didn’t have much fun or many friends.

Parents who struggle to rear and educate children understand all to well that dreams and desires have to be compomised for the possible.

Life is a series of compromises. It has been wisely said that the perfect is the enemy of the possible. When we insist “it’s my way or the highway,” we may be the one who ends up hitting the road.

There are, of course, immutable truths that come from God, but all else can be and frequently must be compromised in real life.

For those things we should heed the wisdom of Isaiah 1:18. “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord.”