Continuing on with the theme of positive ways to interact in conversations, Charles Spurgeon offers great beneficial insight.
About attempts by others to draw us into family, church, school, office, or political differences, dramas, quarrels and disputes, Spurgeon advises:
“Be deaf and blind to these people…If any flagrant injustice has been done, be diligent to set it right, but if it be a mere feud, bid the quarrelsome party cease from it, and tell him once for all that you will have nothing to do with it…”
If we engage their fault-finding, chronically-critical and gossipy narrative, Spurgeon warns, there will be “no end to the strife.”
Spurgeon writes that instead, we can, as he did, take “the wisest course by applying my blind eye to all disputes which dated previously to my advent.”
What he refers to here is that when he was young, and began as a new pastor at a church, he refused to listen to the hearsay and gripes church members bombarded him with regarding his predecessor, and paid no heed to manipulations to steer him into various “camps” which would turn him against other church members.
He goes on to say,
“It is the extreme of unwisdom for a young man fresh from college, or from another charge, to suffer himself to be earwigged by a clique, and to be bribed by kindness and flattery to become a partisan, and so to ruin himself with one-half of his people.”
Therefore, he earnestly recommends, not just for pastors, but for all of us, young and old alike:
“Have nothing of parties and cliques…Blessed are the peacemakers, and one sure way of peacemaking is to let the fire of contention alone. Neither fan it, nor stir it, nor add fuel to it, but let it go out of itself.”
What a stunning bit of wisdom: stunning in that it is rare to actually see it in practice!
Think about our own family, where there almost always is one pot-stirrer who is constantly volunteering gossip, planting misconstrued seeds of doubt and dislike regarding other family members, and who will stop at nothing to create drama in an attempt to get-back-at, assuage their inner insecurities, and be the center of attention.
In addition to a person’s general negativity, they can also keenly manipulate: one minute they are our best friend and confident; the next they are dissing us behind our back due to some perceived slight or offense. Beware of their fluctuating complements and chumminess, as these are most likely a scheme to steer us into their corner and turn us against another family member or mutual acquaintance.
In other words, never trust a malcontent or instigator of drama.
Ditto for the office co-worker, neighbor, acquaintance and friend who, fishing for an accomplice, hopes that we bite and dine with them on their unfavorable perceptions of another.
Don’t go there, Spurgeon says.
Leave that morsel, no matter how tempting, to dangle, thus depriving the slanderer and whiner of their supply, and see if that doesn’t perhaps end their gadding-about-the mouth.
Regardless of whether the person ever does actually cease their shenanigans, what these types of people say and think will stop at our boundary, hitting a once and for all Dead End, because we will it to stop, and go no further with us.
Copyright Barb Harwood
No comments:
Post a Comment