When I was growing up, I remember some of my greatest fears involved conflict.<\/p>\n
Conflict between loved ones, conflict between members of larger communities, conflict at a more regional, national, or global level, or as was mostly the case\u2014conflict in my own life, big or small. When I was young there were global conflicts such as the Cold War, the Falklands War, the war in Iraq, the Rwanda Genocide, as well as ongoing resistance in the Middle East. In Canada there was the Meech Lake Accord, the Oka Crisis, and a riot after many Stanley Cup wins (or losses!).<\/p>\n
There was often conflict in my home growing up. Certainly not broken, but we were like most families with two parents raising four children close in age (my siblings and I can spin some pretty impressive stories of our childhood and the things we did to each other that we couldn\u2019t imagine our kids ever doing \ud83d\ude0a). I even remember conflict in our church when we were calling a new pastor. My parents were vehemently against a decision the church was going to make and this tension made its way into our home quite regularly.<\/p>\n
Conflict is inevitable. I hear this a lot. Especially these days.<\/p>\n
Human psychology teaches us that there are two basic instincts that people default to when confronted with conflict. We call this the \u201cfight or flight syndrome.\u201d Most of us can identify ourselves as more likely to choose one or the other. I certainly know my chosen posture\u2026and I\u2019m not proud of it<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n Recently, our Leadership Team gathered together at a conference to learn about navigating conflict led by The Colossian Forum<\/a>. The Colossian Forum specializes in supporting organizations as they deal with conflict. It was excellent for us as a leadership team to learn from them; they helped us with many wonderful tools.<\/p>\n The Colossian Forum spends a great deal of their time centering their work on bringing people towards what they called \u201ctheir North Star.\u201d And they used Mark 12:30-31: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then love your neighbour as yourself<\/em>.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t help but be reminded of our theme for the school year: Love God, Love Others<\/em>. It\u2019s been our North Star all year long. <\/strong><\/span>I could go a step further and say that this is where our mission statement is derived from:\u00a0 engaging minds, nurturing hearts, shaping God\u2019s world or MIND HEART SOUL! What\u2019s interesting is that layering this \u201cNorth Star\u201d onto conflict seems to be difficult because so many of us have chosen \u201cfight or flight.\u201d<\/p>\n But it doesn\u2019t have to be that way.<\/p>\n In Ephesians, Paul helps define what unity ought to look like. In chapter 4 (after three chapters of Paul gushing about how amazing God is because he sent his Son to die for us) Paul writes, \u201cI urge you to live a life worthy of the unity that you have received in Christ. Be completely humble, gentle, and patient, bearing with one another in love.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n We are already unified through Christ. Unity is not agreeing about everything, but we\u2019ve already attained unity because we agree that Christ is our risen Saviour! As for the rest of our lives (and especially in conflict) we should be humble, gentle, patient, and forbearing. Paul wrote these words especially for those who are in conflict.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n We wouldn\u2019t need to be patient if things were going our way. We wouldn\u2019t need humility if not for a situation that doesn\u2019t call for it. We wouldn\u2019t need to be forbearing if there wasn\u2019t a cross to bear.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it’s any secret as to why we chose this theme for this year\u2026our North Star. We had a hunch that conflict was going to be on the move in our community \ud83d\ude0a. We knew that dealing with conflict is hard and that most of us choose \u201cfight or flight.\u201d We felt we needed a theme verse to remind ourselves of who we really are: our North Star.<\/p>\n It appears our hunches were correct\u2014we do find ourselves amidst conflict at many levels.<\/p>\n My new go-to passage regarding conflict now resides from Ephesians as Paul provides a way of being while we navigate conflict. Our Leadership Team certainly came away from this conference with a renewed spirit of moving to a posture of humility, gentleness, patience, and forbearance when it comes to conflict because our North Star says to “love God, love others.<\/em>”<\/p>\n Mind Heart Soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was growing up, I remember some of my greatest fears involved conflict. Conflict between loved ones, conflict between members of larger communities, conflict at a more regional, national, or global level, or as was mostly the case\u2014conflict in my own life, big or small. When I was young there were global conflicts such […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":6328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,16],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-6306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership","category-school-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6306"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=6306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Our Guiding Star<\/h2>\n
A New Way of Being<\/h2>\n