Resolving Conflict

The love or goodwill you have in your relationships with others is like a beautiful but fragile robin's egg. When you experience conflict in your relationships, how you handle the conflict will either preserve your love and keep it healthy and whole, or it may cause it to break into pieces and turn into a crushed, sticky mess.

Conflict is all about desires that are at war with one another. You might have a conflict at work because your boss wants your paperwork done a certain way but you don't think that's the most efficient use of your time. Or you could have a conflict at home because when your husband comes home from work, he wants to relax and watch TV, while you want to talk about your day. Sometimes you experience conflict with friends because you're annoyed by their habit of arriving late to everything or saying they'll do something and then not following through.

James 4:1-3 says, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

So often, conflict arises because we are seeking comfort, or pleasure, or love, or respect, and we do not receive it. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but our desire for them has become warped when we want them so much that we begin to harbor bitterness and resentment against those who do not give them to us.

So how should you handle conflicts? How do you know who's right? How can you handle conflicts in a way that helps preserve the goodwill in your relationship instead of destroying it?

- Before you start yelling at whoever has made you upset, take some time to stop and think things through. What specifically did the other person do that has made you angry or caused a disagreement? What is the other person valuing and what are you valuing that is causing the disconnect? Sometimes you figure out that you may both be wanting the same overall goal (e.g. a workplace or home that functions smoothly), but you may be disagreeing on how to arrive at that goal.

- Try writing something down or talking things through with someone you trust. This can be helpful for sorting through your thoughts and getting a fresh perspective on the situation.

- Evaluate. Are your desires and wants realistic? And more importantly, are your desires in line with what God wants for your life (i.e. are they in line with what the Bible says we should pursue and desire)? How about the desires of the person with whom you are in conflict?

- Ask yourself: Is the conflict over a matter that is important enough to make a big deal about, or is it something you can forgive and forget? Here, it's important to be aware of your own personal tendencies. Do you tend to run towards conflict, or avoid it? If you are conflict averse, you are going to be more likely to sweep things under the rug that ought to be addressed. But if you have a confrontational personality, you may be more likely to bring up anything that annoys you – even if it really shouldn't be a big deal. Here again, it may be helpful to ask for advice from someone you trust and see whether they the issue at hand is something worth discussing.

- If you decide the conflict is important to bring up and discuss, seek to be as gracious as possible in the way that you address the issue. It's important not to make blanket, accusatory statements (e.g. “You never pay attention to what I think!” or “You're always making things difficult!”), because the person you're talking to will simply feel attacked and will start becoming defensive. Instead, you can try something like, “When you do (or say) _____, it makes me feel _____. Next time, could you try ______ instead?”

- Be quick to acknowledge your own shortcomings and sins and ask forgiveness for them. This is very, very important! If your spouse doesn't complete an important task you asked her to do and goes shopping instead and you yell at her afterward, remember to ask forgiveness for your angry words. Yes, she should have been more responsible, but you are also responsible for your reaction, even if you feel like you couldn't help getting mad.

- Remember that your ultimate goal is to become more like your Savior, who is the ultimate example of patience, long suffering, kindness, and love. He is very patient with us, and we should seek to be patient as well with those who have offended us.

Helping the Depressed, Part 2

Where is God?

Last week I wrote about depression as a loss of hope and a feeling that one's life will always be one-unending, monotonous, gray landscape of sadness and despair. An aspect of depression that I did not mention, and one that generally contributes to the sense of hopelessness, is the feeling that you are far from God. I went through a period of depression during my sophomore year in college, and during that time, it often felt like my prayers were going nowhere. It was as though my prayers were balloons hitting a concrete ceiling and getting stuck there, unable to make their way to the intended destination.

It's really the most awful feeling, because it seems like just when you need him most, God is nowhere to be found. There is no comforting sense of peace, no sense that you are God's beloved child, no feeling that this is temporary and that you will soon be delivered. That very downcast verse at the end of Psalm 88 (“You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; The darkness is my closest friend”) begins to aptly describe your life. So what do you do with these feelings? And how do you help someone who feels this way?

What next?

If you are the depressed person, it can be helpful to examine your life and discover what you may be doing or believing that might be perpetuating these feelings. Sometimes, people are engaged in some kind of disobedient behavior that is causing them to feel far from God. However, this is not always the case, and if you are a friend to a depressed person, it will not be helpful for you to immediately assume that your friend must have done something dreadful, otherwise he or she wouldn't feel depressed. It is very possible that your friend may not have committed some sort of deep dark sin that has led her into depression. Perhaps she is depressed after losing her job or after losing her mother to cancer. Or perhaps she simply feels like her life isn't going anywhere – that she is stuck on a never-ending plateau. But whatever the cause, a person's thought process during depression tends to play a big role in determining whether the depression will continue indefinitely or lift in a fairly short period of time.

Self-deprecating thoughts like, “I should have done X, Y, and Z differently. Then this never would have happened!” or “I can't believe this happened to me. It must mean that I'm a failure!” reinforce depression. Even thoughts like, “I thought I was a strong person, but being depressed for this long must mean I am emotionally weak,” can really erode a person's morale. To help a depressed person, you can strive to understand what kind of dark thoughts are oppressing your friend, and then seek to counteract those thoughts with the truth. Even if the truth is that your friend really should have done something differently, you can remind them that God is always ready and willing to forgive us for our failures and shortcomings, and that he loves us in spite of these things.

Depression as a test of faith

Depression often tries a person's faith. When faced with the sense that you are suffering (because depression is a form of emotional suffering) and God is distant, what do you do? Do you assume that this must indeed be the case, and that God has abandoned you? Or do you remind yourself of God's promises to never leave us or forsake us (Joshua 1:5) and his affirmation that he is close to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18)?

It is easy to give into hopeless thoughts when all your emotions are screaming that you feel miserable and that God isn't listening. But it's often helpful for depressed people to be reminded that, first of all, feelings of deep sadness and misery are not unfamiliar to God's people (see Psalm 88, and the book of Job). It can be tempting to think that depression is a very un-Christian emotion, and if we are subject to it, it must mean either our faith isn't real or that we're pretty unredeemably lousy Christians. But quite frankly, David writes plenty of psalms in which he describes being sad, lonely, and distressed, and plenty of missionaries, pastors, and other faithful Christians have experienced depression. Second, these depressed feelings often persist because we don't understand God's plan at the time and we begin to doubt his love, justice, and wisdom (again, see the book of Job). Doubting God's character always brings confusion and unhappiness. Third, we need to be reminded of the truths that God expresses in His Word and of his past acts of faithfulness and love. God is truly a faithful and loving Father, and it's essential for us to cling to that factual reality, even if at the moment, our emotions seem to be undercutting the truth.

Helping the Depressed

Moments of sadness make their mark at some point in everyone's lives, whether due to illness, a break-up, death in the family, loss of a job, or any number of other causes. For some, these moments become drawn out into days, weeks, even months or sometimes years. Unremitting sadness usually gets labelled depression, and while about 20 million Americans experience depression at any given point in time, it can be difficult to know what to say to a friend who is struggling with these dark feelings.

Most of the time, depressed people don't want to interact with others. They prefer to hole themselves up somewhere and dwell on their negative thoughts. It's much easier to shut yourself off from the outside world when you're depressed than it is to engage with it. Emotionally healthy people tend to look at this as though it were absolute foolishness, and when you're on the outside looking in, it is, but most healthy people tend to discount depression's oppressive power.

As Christians, we are engaged in spiritual warfare, and Satan uses all kinds of lies to deceive us. Depressed people struggle with the lie, “Life is painful, hard, and joyless, and it's always going to feel this way.” It's easy to dispel this lie when your melancholy feelings only last for a few days and then clear up, but when they drag on for weeks or even months upon end, it becomes a lot easier to believe that things are never going to get better, and your life will simply be miserable forever. As Elizabeth Hurtzel wrote in the book Prozac Nation, “That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.”

Ed Welch always tells the students in his Helping Relationships class that depression can feel like different things to different people. For some, it simply feels like waking up to empty despair, morning after morning after morning. For others, depression is like the absence of feeling, a coldness inside that refuses to be thawed by either joys or tragedies. The little things that used to make you happy now make you feel no different than life's calamities. You could come home to a good meal or to an empty house and it would make no difference. You would remain unmoved. If you're talking to a depressed person, it's important to ask what exactly their depression feels like – does it feel like sadness? Emptiness? Something else? What you tell them may change depending on their response.

Ideas for Helping a Depressed Friend

I don't know that there's one key to overcoming depression, but here are a few things to keep in mind when you are dealing with a depressed person.

Don't avoid the person just because he or she is depressed. In fact, try to seek the person out on a regular basis. Yes, it would be easier to avoid him or her, but it will be worse in the long run. Your friend will likely recover faster if he spends time with others rather than stewing alone in his misery.

Know that it will be easy for the depressed person to self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, TV, video games, food, or other types of temporary pleasures. Sometimes it is advisable to try to probe gently to figure out what the person is doing to help himself or herself feel better. Your friend may need to seek professional help if his depression is closely linked to an addiction of some kind.

Be willing to listen to what he has to say. Don't immediately launch into a lecture on how it's ungodly to be depressed. Remember that David writes some pretty dark psalms. However, do try to instill some hope in the person. It might be helpful to ask him if he can think of past instances when something bad has happened and he felt like everything was ruined, but later, things changed. A college professor once told me, “Faith is looking at God's past faithfulness and trusting that he will continue to be faithful in the future.” A person can do that both on an individual level and on a corporate level, seeing how God has been personally faithful to him and also how God has been faithful to his people through the ages, as attested to in the Bible.

Encourage the depressed person to continue to be faithful in loving God and others, even though she doesn't feel like it at the moment. A lot of serving God involves patient perseverance in doing good, even when it doesn't feel like what we're doing is worthwhile. Faith involves going forth in obedience to God's commands in all seasons of life and in all circumstances, and as we grow in our walks with Christ, we will also grow in our ability to obey him even when it's the last thing we want to do.

Reassure the person of your love for them and your commitment to walking with them through what they're facing. Depression can be a lonely battle, and letting a person know you will be there for her is important.