Conflict Resolution

Everyone will at some point in their life deal with conflict, it is inevitable. What is important, and what will define you as a person is how you deal with it. As Christians we are to live up to the teachings of Matthew 18, which coming from someone with first hand experience, is not always easy.

In Matthew 18 we are taught that if your brother offends you, you must go and tell that brother. I think this is all too often our first problem. Many times we will get angry or upset with a person that does not even know they offended us. We cannot always assume someone will know when they have wronged us. Everyone has a different perspective from which they look at life, and what is offensive to one person may be acceptable in another one's eyes. It could also be you took something someone said out of context, and this distorted the whole meaning for you. Then your frustration could be avoided entirely as long as your willing to follow Matthew 18 and go straight to that person. Unfortunately many times this is not the case. I have seen this over and over again, living in a quad with six different girls, with six different minds. It could be as simple as someone doing homework in their room, and someone else being loud in the common area. The person doing homework, more often than not, will get frustrated and take it personally without even asking them to quiet down. We often don't even take it into consideration, the other person may not even know your doing homework in the room next door. When we don't follow the first step in Matthew 18, our frustration will almost always come out in gossip. And gossip is like a wildfire, once you start it its hard to stop it spreading. However if you do in fact go to your brother, and they shut you down, then you must go back to that brother with a few others how know the situation. If they still shut you down, and your outside the church then you must forgive the person and wash your hands of it.

Matthew 18 teaches wonderful solution to conflict. A teaching that too often Christians don't follow themselves. This is unfortunate though because those that do will find their lives to be much less stressful. They will find that they can let go to those frustrating thoughts and forgive one another, whether the one that has wronged them realizes it or not. This isn't an easy task to accomplish, but that is life, no one said it would be easy. And you will so much more gratified when you do.