Caring Enough to Confront- Chapter 1

Caring Enough to Confront

How to Understand and Express Your Deepest Feelings Towards Others

Written by David Augsburger

Preface:

* When my thrust as a person- my hopes, dreams, wants, needs, drives- runs counter to your thrust, there is conflict.

* To sacrifice my thrust is to be untrue to the push and pull of God within me.

*To negate your thrust is to refuse to be reverent before the presence and work of God within you.

* Caring, confronting and integrating your needs and wants with my needs and wants in our joint effort toward creating Christian community is what effective living is about.

* It's not the conflicts that need to concern us, but how the conflicts are handled.

Chapter 1: Care-fronting: The Creative Way Through Conflict

* To confront effectively is to offer the maximum of useful information with the mimimum of threat and stress.

* Care-fronting unifies concern for relationship with concern for goals without sacrificing one for the other, or collapsing one into another.

* Care-fronting is the way to communicate with both impact and respect, with truth and love. "Speaking the truth in love is THE way to mature right relationships.

* Each of these styles of behavior has its appropriate time, situation, and use.

5 Options of Dealing With Conflict:

1. "I care enough to confront" is the I-want-relationship-and-I-also-want-honest-integrity position. Working through differences by giving clear messages of "I care" and "I want" which both care and confront, is most helpful. This is interpersonal communication at its best.

2. "I'll meet you halfway" is the I-have-only-half-the-truth-and-I-need-your-half position. It calls for at least a parial sacrifice of deeply held views and goals which may cost all of us the loss of the best. Only when we care enough to tussle with truth can we test, retest, refine, and perhaps find more of it through our working at it seriously.

3. "I'll give in" is the I'll-yield-to-be-nice-since-I-need-your-friendship approach. You become a dormat- frustrated, yet smiling. The more tense and tight on the inside, the more generous and submissive on the outside.

4. "I'll get out" is the I'm-uncomfortable-so-I'll-withdraw stance towrad conflict. The viewpoint here is that conflicts are hopeless, people cannot be changed; we either overlook them or withdraw. Conflicts are to be avoided at all costs. When they threaten, get out of their way. It is a way out, not a way through. However it has its advantages if safety is a concern.

5. "I'll get him" is the I-win-you-lose-because-I'm right-you're wrong position in conflict. The goal is valued above relationship.

Caring and Confronting

Caring= I want to stay in respectful relationships with you.

Confronting= I want you to know where I stand and what I'm feeling, needing, valuing, and wanting.

Caring-I care about out relationship

Confronting- I feel deeply about the issue at stake.

Caring-I want to hear your view.

Confronting- I want to clearly express mine.

Caring-I want to respect your insights.

Confronting- I want respect for mine.

Caring- I trust you to be able to handle my honest feelings

Confronting- I want you to trust me with yours.

Caring- I promise to stay with the discussion until we've reached an understanding

Confronting- I want you to keep working with me until we've reached a new understanding

Caring- I wil not trick, pressure, manipulate, or distort our differences.

Confronting- I want your unpressured, clear, honest view of our differences.

Caring- I give you my loving, honest respect.

Confronting- I want your caring, confronting response.

* The ability to respond in varied ways and the flexibility to match one's response to the shape a conflict is taking, are crucial skills to be added to year by year.

Jesus' Example

When examining Jesus' responses to vaious situations by using the language of conflict styles, one is immediately struck by His willingness to use any and all of the five as appropriate to His goals of redemtpive coompassion.

1. When rejected by his hometown, Jesus withdrew (Luke 4:14-30)

2. He cut off conversation and debate with the Pharasees when the point of clear rejection had arrived (John 11:45-57)

3. He confronted the hucksters and hustlers in the temple on "I-win-you-lose" terms (Mark 11:11)

4. Another example of "I-win-you-lose" is found in Jesus' clear statements to the religious leaders in Matthew 23, given after they had willed and arranged his death.

5. Jesus submitted to the anger of others, absorbed it, and spoke back the word of forgiveness, grace and acceptance at his arrest, during His interrogation, throughout His trial, in His unjust beating, and even through His execution.

6. In John 8:7-11, to the would-be executioners of an acused adulteress, Jesus listened, waiting to hear their persistent questioning, to record all charges in the dust. (Caring). Then he said, "Let the one among you who has never sinned throw the first stone at her." (Confrontation). To the woman, He said, "Where are they all-did no one condemn you?..."No one, sir." "Neither do I condemn you." (Caring). "Go away now and do not sin again. (Confrontation)

7. To the rich, vain, conceited young ruler, Jesus listened, responded clearly, then looked at him and loved him. Then Jesus confronted. "Go, sell all, give to the por, and come follow me." (Mark 10)

8. To Nicodemus (John 3), to the outcast minority-group woman at the public watering place (John 4), to the mayor of Capernaum whose son is at the point of death (John 4), Jesus cared and confronted. He spoke truth in love. He was truth. He was love.

* Eph 4:13, 15

So shall we all at last attain to the unity inherent in our faith and our knowledge of the Son of God- to mature manhood, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ...Let us speak the truth in love; so shall we fully grow up into Christ.

* Truth and love are the two necessary ingredients for any relationship with integrity. Love-because all positive relationships begin with friendship, appreciation, respect. And truth- because no relationship of trust can long grow from dishonessty, deceit, betrayal; it springs up from the solid stuff of integrity. Confronting and caring stimulate growth.

*Salvation- God's judgement- radical honesty about truth-confronts us with the demands of disciplined maturity. God's grace-undeserved love- reaches out to acept and affirm us at the point we know ourselves to be unacceptable.