The Road We Must Travel by Francis Chan

Author:Francis Chan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worthy
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE ART OF MANAGING CONFLICT

When Conflict Occurs Where You Least Expect It

GORDON MACDONALD

One of our family scrapbooks contains a note written many years ago by our daughter’s best friend, Cindy. It was written when the girls were both eight years old and inseparable. They walked to school together every morning, enjoyed frequent sleepovers, and consulted one another on homework assignments each night.

Then one day a tiny incident stressed their friendship. Our daughter, becoming impatient when Cindy would not walk fast enough on the way to school, called her a slowpoke.

It was impulsive, a bad choice of words. One can only guess what it may have meant to Cindy. At any rate there was instant enmity between the girls. That evening there was no collaboration on homework. An upcoming sleepover was canceled. And the following morning the girls walked to school by different routes.

A day later a note, the one in our scrapbook, came in the mail. Addressed to our daughter, it read: “You called me a slowpoke, and I am angry at you. Your [sic] no longer friend, Cindy.” Could Cindy have been more specific? The issue, her feelings, the altered status of the relationship—all clearly defined in two sentences.

The separation lasted, at most, one more day. When both girls realized how much they missed each other, they offered mutual “sorrys” (one for walking too slow, the other for using the epithet “slowpoke”) and resumed their friendship. Soon, it was as if nothing had come between them.

Yet something had happened; something had been learned. One girl had become aware of the importance of guarding her tongue lest an errant word hurt another’s feelings. And the other learned not to overreact in a heated moment. Valuable lessons. If remembered, the “learnings” might save both of them in many of the inevitable quarrels they would experience in the future.

I recall wishing at the time that it would be nice if some of the adults in our church could deal with their prickly issues as clearly, as quickly, and as completely as the two girls had done. And what I wished for my congregation, I also wished for myself. In the field of human conflict, I was far from a genius.

A CONFLICT AVOIDER

I hated conflict as a child. When it occurred between my parents, I often felt a sense of responsibility to try and reconcile them. But I never succeeded because I was incapable of understanding the complexity of the underlying problems that so frequently separated them. When there was conflict between my parents and myself, I felt fear, humiliation, and a sense of insignificance because it never seemed (at least to me) that anyone cared to listen to my side of the story or to offer me the benefit of the doubt. No matter the issue, when adults were involved, I always seemed to come out the loser.

Thus, my preferred way of handling conflict in my younger years became the strategy of avoidance. How? By being super-nice and convivial, by taking care to say nothing that might offend or create controversy, by quickly backing down when opposed.

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