Stop the Fight Before It Starts

“The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out.” – Proverbs 17:14

The Hatfields and McCoys are the American equivalent of the Capulets and Montagues (Romeo and Juliet). The Hatfield-Mccoy feud boiled into a bloodbath in 1878-88 along the West Virginia-Kentucky border. It left a brutal body count—each family lost over a dozen. A decade of escalating vengeance left a wake of generational devastation. And it all started…with a pig. A fight over a pig.

That’s what this proverb warns us about. Once you open the door of an argument, it’s like a pinprick in a dam. At first water trickles through, but the pressure spreads and before you know it, the whole wall collapses under a raging river.

The solution might appear to be stoicism: when it comes to conflict—just don’t. Stuff it down, deep down, and just keep holding back all the water because you don’t want to unleash a flood on the other person. But it’s not simple. Remember that proverbs don’t capture everything. They’re maxims. Proverbs are often merely observational. If you literally avoid all conflict, you turn into a resentful doormat. But there are many times you’d be better off to say nothing at all. There’s two reasons for that.

1) Jesus brings an ethos of forgiveness

The only reason we exist and have a relationship with God is because of his forgiveness. He makes the sun shine on the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45). He forgives in Jesus without limit (Matthew 18:21-35).

A primary cause of grief in our world is that we have lost not only the categories but even the vocabulary of “confession” and “forgiveness.” But in a world shot through with sin, those practices are the only way we avoid things like nuclear holocaust.

If you see that God relates to you in this way, it will increase your capacity for forgiveness. The difference between forgiveness and vengeance is about who absorbs the blow. Someone has to pay. When you’re wearing the forgiveness of Christ, you’ll still take some of the hit, but Jesus is your shock-absorber.

2) It’s hard to do conflict well

You see this in marriage all the time. What started as a fight over the dishes somehow ended in analyzing your spouse’s upbringing and sanity. What happened? It’s not as if clean dishes aren’t important. You should work towards a mutual understanding of when a plate goes in the dishwasher. But maybe you should think about how hard you push on this.

This proverb warns us that conflict easily gets out of hand. The longer the relationship goes, the more this is the case, because the list of past grievances grows. You get heated, your emotions get the better of you, everything blurs together, and an hour after starting in about the dish, you’re talking about that thing from ten years ago.

There was a guy in my small group once who was approaching fifty years of marriage. He used to say that all he or his wife needed to do was say one word to set the other person off for the whole day. We need to choose our battles.

How to Strife Well

If you must start up some strife, focus on loving the other person. Many times a conflict escalates not because of the issue itself, or even the reasons behind it, but the tone of the argument. Jesus corrected his followers, and he will point out sin in your life, but his tone is always love. Love places a person above proving yourself, which captures the heart of Jesus’ work for us.