Conflict and Understanding

I am now one week away from starting Grad School. Working for my Masters in Counseling will surely be an emotional roller coaster as I process through the experiences and family history of others and myself in an attempt to comprehend why we do what we do, why we think what we think, and why we feel what we feel. At this particular spot on my path God has chosen to teach me about 2 different yet incredibly intertwined relational ideas: conflict and the desire to understand others. Fellowship and its speakers should forgive me for quoting and misquoting them, but the following is how God has embedded conflict and understanding in my heart.

Conflict - I have never liked that word. The animosity and tense nature associated with the word alone are enough to make me cringe. Conflict is a driver of arguments, fights, divorce, hate, and war. Conflict is also a driver for, get this, personal growth. Healthy conflict leads to personal growth, not sometimes, all the time. Most conflict is steeply rooted in pride or being right, rather than what is actually the issue at hand. You see it in your marriage, at work, etc. Conflict arises over a specific issue or occurrence but quickly becomes about something much different, many times much bigger.

Healthy conflict must forfeit pride at the door. Healthy conflict is a tool that can be used to increase perspective, humility, care, and compassion, among other things. But the root of healthy conflict is an act so foreign to our human nature that it takes a constant, conscious effort to achieve it. To succeed in healthy conflict, we must have an ongoing desire to understand others point of view.

Desire to Understand Others - Simply put, the desire to understand others is the lynch pin to success in healthy conflict. Only through truly having a heart to understand others can we grow through conflict. If we do not care where others are coming from we will not understand them and we will not have anything other than harmful conflict with them. Let me make this very clear, understanding should never prevail at the cost of sacrificing truth. This is very important when looking at social hot button issues. We can be understanding without sacrificing truth.

To understand a person, you must understand their heart. What makes them tick? What do they really care about? If you listen, they will tell you.

God has been really working on me in this area this year, at times when I did not even realize it. It really came together for me in church recently when a speaker talked about this very subject. God has shown me so much about my amazing wife this year. The world fills our heads with ideas about how husbands, wives, couples should be. What they should do and how they should act. God has replaced my worldly mindset with a heart and love for the unique and amazing things about Louise. When I look at her, I don't think about what she isn't, I see what she is. I see the pure and perfect way that God created her. I see the woman that God has a big plan for. God knew exactly how to wire Louise and I so that we would have a successful marriage. As a desire to understand her has grown in my heart this year, our conflicts have become much more productive.

Praise God for a heart to understand others, goodness knows that is not my natural disposition!

Proverbs Chapter 3

13 Blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
the man who gains understanding,

14 for she is more profitable than silver
and yields better returns than gold.