Walking Through a Minefield // It's Time to Get Over It, Part 4

Relationships – at home, at work, with friends – well they can be like walking through a mine field.  Everything's fine – and then you step on a mine….. It's a funny thing, but a relationship can be going along just fine, work, home, friends, just ticking along. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, this person comes out punching. Whoa! I didn't see that coming. Like a curve ball to the solar plexus, they just attack us or spit out some angry words or say something that just blows us out of the water. And as we pick ourselves off the floor we are thinking, "I just didn't' see that coming. What was that about, I mean what did I do to deserve that?" And sometimes it's the other way around we just lash out at someone and afterwards we think, "Why did I do that?" you know what I mean. I was visiting a radio station recently, an executive in a different country. And I had a morning meeting scheduled with him to talk about a few issues. And while I was on the way in, in the car, and he range me and he said, "Look, I still really want to meet with you but I have this problem, there is this really big human resources problem that has blown up in my face at work. Can we meet at a little bit later?" Well I had some flexibility that day, my plane had been delayed so we were able to meet later. Turns out that he was having some real conflict with one of the staff there. Something, it just exploded, and if I told you the issue you would fall of your chair, so I won't. It seemed so minor, so small, so insignificant and yet there was a huge conflict over the issue. Do you enjoy conflict? Most of us don't. I certainly do not enjoy conflict. Yet so often it is a bit like that movie, "The Truman Show". You would be walking along on a sunny day, along the road and someone movie director somewhere presses a button, and without warning a bomb goes off right next to us! Have you ever wondered why? Well there are a lot of reasons, but one, one happens time and time again. It is the issue of insecurity in peoples lives. This week on A Different Perspective I have called this little group of messages, "Getting over it!" we are looking at the subject of insecurity. Have you ever asked yourself, "What is it? What is insecurity? We need to stop and thing about that. We bandied the word around, but what exactly, what is it? We all have as people a life preservation instinct. If we are driving along in a car and all of a sudden a car pulls out in front of us. We slam on the brakes and the adrenalin pumps through the veins. And we try and save ourselves. And the same is true emotionally. When something comes out of the blue that we find threatening, we either decide to fight it and come out punching or we've run away. We avoid it, we don't confront it. We just stew inside and it eats away at us. There is something built into each one of us. Which is about self preservation. And that's ok, that's normal, but sometimes there are things inside us that create irrational fears. Fears that don't make any logical sense. I don't so much as have a fear of heights, but I know that when I am standing on a balcony several floors up, if there is no roof above me and I look up at the sky, I find that really scary, unsettling thing. I feel as though I am about to fall off the balcony. It doesn't make sense, it is just there. Some people have an irrational fear of spiders or sharks. We all know that there are far more chances of being run over by the proverbial bus than there is by being killed by a spider or a shark or a snake. Some people are petrified about flying in planes. None of those fears are rational. But they are very real. And these irrational fears can go into our emotional dimension as well. We can be unduly concerned about what people think of us. What they say of us. We can be really touchy about people stepping on our turf. Maybe we are bucking for a promotion. Maybe we are worried about job security. Maybe we are a bit touchy about being overweight. The list goes on an on. Whatever it is outside when people look at us they don't always know what things we are precious about. Where in our lives we are insecure. Either that or they know and they think it is stupid, I mean, they just dismiss it. "Ah she's just worried about what the boss will think." Insecurities in other people well they are like a minefield. We can be walking along through this field, through a relationship, everything is ok. BANG! And there is no sign to say, "Don't put your foot here, there is a mine under this bit of dirt." So what can we do about it. The minefield picture is a useful framework to have in our hearts and our minds. One of the things that we can do is to watch people, to observe them, to get to know them, to start to figure out where their insecurities are. I was doing some consulting work as I used to do over many, many years, with a government department. And the man that I was working with was a really cool, balanced, intelligent man. But as I saw him in meetings and working with other people in the organisation, there are a couple of things that he reacted really badly to. I thought, "That's really interesting" I mean on the surface he is so competent, he is so intelligent, he is so well collected and has himself sorted out. He has been around this organisation for a long time. He knows the people, he knows the terrain, he knows the issues. Why did he react so badly to those issues in those meetings? As I got to know him and had coffee with him and worked with him, one day it came out. The organisation had just had a restructure, and as a result of that restructure the one job that gave him a promotion after all these years in the organisation, had been restructure right out of the organisation. So his career path was gone. After 25 years, his hopes, his dreams for promotion were gone. Well would you be cheesed off at that, I would. That would get me going I think. And so I just found a land mine. And once I knew where it was not only could I avoid stepping on it, but I could also behave and act and help through that little bit of insecurity. Because it's not always possible is it? Sometimes you are just walking along and … BANG! This person blows up in your face. And then we go, "Alright, now I am threatened." I remember once having a client yelling down the mobile phone, yelling abuse down the mobile phone at me. Well what do we do? We can either, run and hide, or we can go BANG right back. There is actually a third option. We can not react at all. We can just let them go, take it on board and resist the urge to rip their heads off their shoulders. The apostle Paul in a letter that he wrote to the church in Corinth, almost 2,000 years ago. It's a verse that is really well-known, often quoted at weddings, he wrote this: Love is patient and kind, it is not rude, it is not self interested. It is not easily angered. And it doesn't keep a list of wrongs. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5) Elsewhere throughout the bible in fact throughout the whole of the Old Testament, 8 times it says that God is slow to anger. And each of those 8 times it finishes the sentence with this, "and He is abounding in love and faithfulness." God is slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness. The flip side of that is being quick to anger. And when we get angry quickly at people who have reacted badly to something we don't understand we are doing the opposite of abounding in love and faithfulness. I wonder if the next time someone blows up in our faces, I wonder if we remembered, "Hmm maybe something or someone has just trodden on some insecurity that I can't see. How about I just let it wash by me. And then try and understand it a little bit later." I wonder if we responded that way if we were slow to anger when someone goes off in our face like a cracker. I wonder how much better life would be.