Talk

It started out innocent enough. I was tired. You were cranky. I was irritable and so I didn’t watch my tone. You were frustrated with your day and so you took offense. Before we knew it, what started out as an offhand remark has escalated into a pitched battle. We have dug our trenches and fortified our defenses. We have lobbed our bombs, knowing exactly where the other is weakest. We make frontal assaults to hide our deadliest attack which is coming from behind. The battle wages, neither side yielding, and so we bring out those instruments of death, the weapons of mass destruction that we both agreed to outlaw. I gas you with the past and you nuke me with the potential future. Now we both lay wounded and weary, nursing our wounds and calculating the strategy for the next assault.

What are we trying to accomplish, really? What is important? Is it important that I am right or that you detect my true motivation? Is it worth the struggle to convince me that I was snarky or that I force you to confess that you took offense to something insignificant? What are we fighting for?

If we are fighting for you in one corner and me in the other then I lay down my arms. If we are fighting to see who comes out on top, I think I just want to yield the day. If we are fighting for something more. . .if we are fighting to be better, to be stronger, to be deeper in our commitment to one another, I will hang in there with you because I know that we are doing everything to come out of our corners—not to fight but to be reconciled. So can we talk? Can we talk about what I said? Could we chat about what you heard? Most of all, could we have a conversation about what we want to happen next so that we could know what we are fighting for?

A fellow traveler,

Blake

What’s my next step?

We encourage you to consider engaging in the following as a way of handing off faith in your family.

Seek reconciliation:  The ultimate win in conflict is the experience of reconciliation and restoration in our relationships and not the adjustment of behaviors. If we value relationships, the necessary adjustment of behaviors will follow. This week, consider modeling this with your children by addressing a conflict you might be having with them. Consider approaching them affirming your love for them and your desire to be unified with them. Ask next what steps need to be taken to move to unity. Allow the conversation to ebb and flow, putting it down and taking it up as needed. As the conversation progresses, seek not to “power up” but only to maintain the focus on ending at a point of restoration and reconciliation.

We encourage you to consider engaging in the following as a way of deepening your own faith.

Engage in the ministry of reconciliation: In our conflicts, we want to be right, to win by coming out on top. However, coming out on top and losing the relationship is in reality losing in conflict. The real win in conflict is arriving at a place of reconciliation and restoration in our relationships. This means we talk to our opponent differently. Our desire is to stress our desire to be right with our opponent rather than to be right. Consider setting aside time this week to have a conversation with someone with whom you are in conflict. Before you arrive, consider taking time to meditate on 2 Corinthians 5.17-19. Consider how God has made you new and how this newness reorients your conversation over conflict, moving it to a conversation about reconciliation. Enter your conversation keeping restoration at the forefront of everything and allow God’s grace to lead the two of you to the next steps.