You Gotta Get Along

People just don’t know how to get along. I mean, really! People don’t know how to talk to each other, don’t know how to be civil. Take, for example, the most recent tool for contlict—email. Some of the email messages people send out in the name of "caring" are horrific. I can’t imagine what they are thinking when they send them. But they do. Here’s a list of things to do to learn to get along. I’ll admit this is somewhat moralistic and doesn’t connect to the reason behind the reason for the list, but that’s for another post. You do the following, you’ll be better able to get along—with anybody!

Don’t send complaints to people via email—EVER! You’ll be more likely to be nice in a phone conversation or face to face and you’ll probably get better results too.

When you find yourself upset, ask, “How did I contribute to this?” If you are really brave, ask someone who knows you well to help you understand. But count the cost. If you are married, your spouse will be more than happy to tell you. I guarantee it.

Listen well. Don’t assume you know whats going on. You probably don’t. In fact, repeat back to others what you hear them saying. Most of us love to talk and we’re lousy at listening. More often than not people need to be cared for, empathized with, and heard. This takes a lot of maturity because some of the conflict we experience has little to do with our actions towards another and a lot to do with their perspective.

Realize that your perspective is your perspective and that’s it. You have only a part of the truth of what happened. This is hard to communicate to those who think that “they are right.”

People really do bad things. You do bad things. So be careful to not be overly judgmental. Another thought along these lines would be that people do what they do for reason. Try to figure it out and you'll often solve the conflict. 

Hang on to yourself. By that I mean that even people of faith, who believe that they are created in the image of God, have a uniqueness to them that reflects that image differently from anyone else. Some conflict has to do with differences with reference to that uniqueness, that others cannot reconcile with, and will invariably attach moral attributes to. Be careful here. And don’t read behind the lines. I'm not trying to hide anything in this sentence. Keep this in mind: sameness doesn’t equal intimacy. Think about that for a while. It could change your life. The conflicts I’ve often seen in church are not so much over issues of morality, as issues of culture or difference or preference.

Submission doesn’t mean subservience. By that I mean that being submissive to authority doesn’t mean you’ll do what those in authority tell you to do all the time. For example, the boss or your husband or your wife doesn’t have the right to tell you to do something wrong. Its not submission, biblical or otherwise, to do evil in the name of resolving conflict. For that reason, sometimes truly solving a conflict feels like conflict. Which leads to another thought….

Disrupt the false peace. You read it right. There is a peace that is a false peace. That peace isn’t peace at all but conflict disquised as peace. Disrupt it. If you are at a restaurant with a group of people and you order $20 worth of food and others order $40 worth of food and someone comes up with the bright idea to “split the tabe equally” then say, “Nope. I’ll pay $20 and that’s that.” You’ll have disrupted the false peace and maybe even created an argument but you’ve resolved a conflict. There are miriads of these kinds of examples.

If you are uptight with someone, go talk to them. Don’t go talk to someone else unless that person is needed to help you gain perspective. To bring someone else into the conflict is called Triangulation and its death. Run from it.

When talking to others say something like this, “Help me to understand the reason you….” Then listen. Nine out of ten times the conflict will be resolved.

If that doesn’t resolve it then say, “I notice….. and I feel…..I’d prefer….. Then you let them respond. By putting things in the “I” you’ve taken away much of the ugly attack that comes when people say, “You did….” This is tough to do and demands maturity. Good luck.

If they won’t negotiate a solution, or even acknowledge a problem, and you are in authority, then you use your authority to address the issue. If you have no authority to address the issue further, avoid escalation by holding firm to the scerenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Lots of conflict is rooted so deep in people’s lives and cannot be resolved apart from an act of God. I’ve come to accept this in recent years.

Much of this comes straight out of the Bible. But there is a lot of common sense things that people can do to make relationships work. The bottom line is this, because Jesus resolved our deepest conflict—the conflict we have with a holy God--those of us who are Christians can too. That’s the bottom line. But for everyone else, these simple guidelines (which are coming off the top of my head at this writing and which I’ll update on occasion) can work quite nicely. Peace!