I’ve answered several political surveys this year. My state has three contested congressional races on top of the presidential election, so pollsters want to know what we’re thinking. My ‘favorite’ line of questions sound like an exercise in sowing deception. They give you statements you’re asked to assume to be true in order to predict whether you would be more or less likely to vote for the dirt-bag candidate who hates children or the saint who is sponsoring this poll. I told one pollster after he had read a glowingly positive statement about a candidate, “If you put it that way, how could I not vote for him?”
I’d like to know what Americans (or even people throughout North America) believe about normal life. For instance, how many of us would agree that life is conflict? Thinking of Jurassic Park, perhaps more of us would accept life as change or growth, but both change and growth involve straining against the current state and that’s a type of conflict. It may be man against nature or against himself.
I wonder how many of us see conflict as a natural part of communication. I can’t say I do. Minor conflicts jar me too much. It can be embarrassing to step on someone’s toes because your responsibilities overlap with theirs. Or you’re in someone’s home and they do something you think is unnecessary, and you say what you think. Those are the negligible conflicts that inspire people like me to worry. They can feed a lingering suspicion that we are always wrong and should avoid speaking up in any situation, just because someone doesn’t see it our way or know the same things we know.
And if we did do something wrong, that only multiplies our bad feelings. Of course, we don’t really believe we’re always wrong. If we did, we’d never get the mail. But our suspicion has that absolute quality to it. That slip-up we made, we believe, illustrates everything notable about our lives.
If we were to see conflict as a natural part of life, then we should expect to disagree without incurring a moral problem. No one has to have sinned during the commission of this disagreement/conversation. We were just talking. And talking entails conflict (or change or growth).
The Lord said he would fill every valley and lower every hill; he would beat smooth every rough path. That’s going to be difficult, but the Lord hasn’t called us into it to handle on our own. He is our king, master, and ruler. Even in this, his burden is light.
Regardless our feelings, when we rest in Christ we are not wrong.
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
