Repairing the Breach: Defining Conflict with Wisdom

And what would happen if you could see the problem as something outside of yourself and not something that is yourself or the other person? See, I think if we follow those types of practices, we can change the tenor of our whole culture from one of polarization, meaning you believe this and therefore, I don't like this, so I hate you, to one that says, we have an issue. [00:57:02] (31 seconds)  #ProblemNotPerson

And one of the issues that that the open ended questions really help us get to is the fact that oftentimes, we equate what we think with who we are. So if someone attacks my position on something, they're attacking me. But that's not true. And when you take the the time to ask these deeper questions, to define the problem or to understand the conflict, then you can get to what's really going on, and you can preserve the relationship. [00:55:55] (36 seconds)  #SeparateBeliefFromIdentity

And the really cool thing is when Beau and I have were taught how to do marriage counseling, one of the things that they taught us was that if you can get a couple together to define the conflict together, you help them understand that the conflict is not one or the other of them. The conflict is something that's going on between them, but it's not them. So it's something kind of outside of them, and then they're on the same team trying to solve it. [00:46:03] (33 seconds)  #ConflictIsBetweenUs

And when you do that, you you all of a sudden, you've you've already created a win because you've defined the problem the same. So it's like, oh, good. We're on the same team, and we can define the problem the same way. So now we can use those same skills to get at some healthy solutions. And those skills involve listening and that deep listening of asking things like, why is this important to you? [00:49:44] (25 seconds)  #DeepListeningWins

And, you know, I am an eternal optimist because of the hope I have in Jesus. And so I wanna invite you to think about a conflict that you're experiencing now and to think about what would happen if you could, together with the other person or persons, define the conflict, define the problem. And what would happen if, instead of trying to get to the answer real quickly, you instead asked deeper, open ended questions. [00:56:31] (31 seconds)  #SlowDownAskWhy

I got a call from a colleague this week who had received a call from a member of the community. And this woman was older, and she had been together with her partner for forty years, but they had never gotten married. And her partner had now been diagnosed with a terminal illness and was on hospice. And they wanted to get married to just celebrate the love that had been a part of their life for so long. But he is a still a member of the United Methodist Church, but a little more on the conservative side. [00:33:28] (42 seconds)  #CompassionOverPolicy

And so it turns out there was a very good, healthy, clear solution if he had taken the time to understand understand the problem. And so it invites us to really listen and try to seek that knowledge instead of just looking at defining the problem on the surface level. And that requires us to keep digging deeper. Why is it that people feel this way? What is going on? [00:44:36] (30 seconds)  #DigForUnderstanding

So they're arguing back and forth, I want the orange. I want the orange. I want the orange. No. It's mine. It's mine. It's mine. I'm the older. I'm the younger. the father hears this and comes in, takes a knife, cuts the orange in half, and gives it to them, upon which each of them bursts into tears and runs to their room. And he's like, okay. That clearly did not solve the problem. [00:43:46] (25 seconds)  #SolveTheRightProblem