Tag: Family Conflict

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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You’ve experienced the moment before: Someone got something you didn’t get, and you wanted it for yourself. In that moment, what you were experiencing was jealousy. Maybe you worked through your jealousy and moved on with your life. Maybe, though, you got stuck on it and it became something that began impacting that relationship. Jealousy can make a mess in our relationships. As we get to the end of our teaching series, Stormy Waters, we are talking about one last potent contributor to our family conflicts. Let’s talk about jealousy, what it is, and how to avoid it.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Have you ever been around people who are just…content. They have things, but those things don’t have them. They never seem to be affected by what the people around them have…or what the people around them acquire. Hard circumstances might trouble them, but they don’t seem to overly burden them. There are certainly things they value, but they seem to be able to see a value in those things that goes beyond the things themselves such that if they suddenly didn’t have those things for some reason, they aren’t going to come unraveled over that. Now, on the one hand, these kinds of folks can be really hard to be around because they sometimes serve as a magnifying glass on all the places where we aren’t like that. We don’t like standing in front of mirrors that highlight our known flaws. At the same time, though, these are the kinds of people we want to be around because they carry with them a kind of promise that we can be better than we are. They give us an enacted vision of who we could be. They show us that a life free from the burdens and worries that so often drag us down really is a possibility. The truth is, though, that contentment like that is a hard mark to hit. 

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A Slice of Pie

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Getting through conflict is always tricky, especially family conflict. One of the best navigational tools to help us in this effort is something we see put on display in the life of Jacob just before his reunion with his estranged brother, Esau in their story in Genesis. While Jacob’s approach is rooted in having a correct understanding of who God is and who we are, we often talk about it in terms of dessert. Let’s talk about resolving conflict, pie, and how to get relationships right.

A Slice of Pie

I grew up in Independence, MO. My hometown has several claims to fame, but the most recent and well-known is that it was the hometown of President Truman. Truman still looms large over the medium-sized city that still feels like a small town in many ways. The First Baptist Church I grew up attending has an address on Truman Road. It is just a couple of blocks up from the Truman Home where he lived before becoming President and afterwards until his death in 1972. If you look down another street that goes out from the church you can see the Truman Library about a mile up the road. My high school and undergraduate institutions were both named for him. Reading about half of his classic biography by David McCullough was required in my college history class. It was pretty much all Truman all the time for me. 

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What’s Mine Should Be Mine

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We all love talking about our rights. We like having our rights honored and respected. When something should be ours, we want that thing, whatever it happens to be. Not getting our rights recognized can lead to conflict. Big conflict. This happens out in the world, but it also happens in our own families. In this second part of our teaching series, Stormy Waters, we are talking about the conflict that can arise in families when different members feel like they aren’t getting what is theirs by right. Let’s look at how we can navigate these stormy waters with a look at how Abraham had to navigate his own family drama. Read on for more.

What’s Mine Should Be Mine

We hear a lot of talk about rights these days. Political candidates of various stripes assure us that if elected they will be tireless in their fight for our rights. People claim to have rights to all sorts of things. Sometimes the government itself tells us certain things are within our rights as citizens. Our Constitution was only ratified when it got paired with a Bill of Rights, a set of things the Founders declared were inherent to citizenship in this nation and which cannot be taken from us by any state actor. In the opening lines of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson declared life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be among a set of unalienable rights from our Creator that are common to all people everywhere. These are things we can claim as our own simply by virtue of being human. 

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Differences Don’t Have to Divide

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series called, Stormy Waters. For the next few weeks, we are going to be talking about how to navigate family conflict without losing our minds. Family conflict is hard. It can be some of the messiest conflict we ever have to face. Thankfully, the Scriptures give us some helping wisdom on how to make it through without losing ourselves or our relationships. In this first part of our journey, we are starting where so many of our conflicts start: with differences. You’re not like the other people in your family, and occasionally that leads to conflict. Let’s talk about how to navigate it.

Differences Don’t Have to Divide

I love my sister. But we are not the same. For starters, she’s my sister. That fact sets us apart pretty well by itself. But the differences run much deeper than that. We didn’t like or excel at the same sports or activities growing up. We didn’t share the same tastes in music. Her friends sometimes made me want to move out when they visited. My friends and I once snuck into her room after a sleepover when there were like four of them on her big bed, and lifted up one side of the mattress so they all slid off the other side, one after the next on top of each other. That is to say, my friends drove her crazy too. We watched different TV shows. We had different interests. She would occasionally try to do things that I did before her (probably because I was her big brother and she wanted to be like me), but I would give her such a hard time about not doing whatever it was like I did that she didn’t tend to stick with those things very long. She quickly found her own things, and I don’t blame her. 

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