Because of the imperfection of humans, misunderstandings and conflicts are unavoidable. In a certain sense, all men are strangers to one another. Even friends do not really know each other. Conflict is part of our existence. Every human being, whoever or whatever he maybe, has the potentiality of hurting or disappointing you. Conflict is bound to occur but resolving it is imperative. When a conflict is handled correctly it strengthens relationship.
The Holy Book said; “you shall not hate your brother in your heart.” Our Heavenly Father demands that if you have a gift to offer to Him but there at the altar remember that there is a rift between you and your brother, you should suspend the giving and go first and make peace with your brother. He accepts a man first before accepting his gift. Murder first exists in the mind. So, he who gives hatred a place in his heart is setting his feet in the path of the murderer and his worship is abhorrent to the Holy Father. You should make forgiveness an already made gift in your pocket for all. Offences must come; you must be ready to forgive. Learn to get over things. Forgive yourself and others quickly. Do not hold guilt or bear grudge.
Grudge is one thing that does not get better if nursed. It is human to misunderstand and make a quarrel but a prolonged grudge is devilish. It is an honour to stay out of fight, only fools insist on quarrelling. He who is unyielding in a dispute is a sinner. Only those who are at enmity with their creator enjoy being at enmity with one another. If a disagreement should be resolved and could be resolved but it is not, then stubbornness and selfishness are at the core. A long dispute means that both parties are wrong. Those who make peaceful resolution impossible will make violent resolution inevitable.
Anger often times is more hurtful than the causative injury. Many may begin a war but few may end it. A hot tempered man starts fight and gets into all kinds of troubles. Vengeance is more expensive than forgiveness. Seeking revenge is like praying to the devil to help you. The fact that you are the one who set up the fire does not mean that the fire cannot burn you. Anger deprives a sage of his wisdom and a prophet of his vision. It was anger that made prophet Moses to break all the ten commandments. There is no excuse for an uncontrolled anger. It can bring about your down fall. Wait and be patient and later you will be happy you did. The one who succeeds in making you angry has conquered you. Violent hatred sinks one below those he hates. Holding on to anger is like grasping hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. The acid of anger harms the one in whom it is stored than the one on whom it is poured. You are the first victim of your anger. Anger is a tiger that tears not its prey only but also its own raging heart. Anger is short madness. It is a hobgoblin. You may not be punished for your anger, but you must be punished by your anger if you fail to control it. People cannot drive you crazy unless you give them the kay. When you offend someone, say “I am sorry”, when someone offends you, forgive. Hating people is like burning down your house to kill a rat inside a room. What you should hate is hatred itself. Revenge is never sweet, the aftermath is always bitter. Revenge converts a little right into a big wrong. Weak people revenge, strong people forgive, intelligent people ignore. Ignoring an enemy is a powerful revenge. In this world you can do anything if you are ready to face the consequences. A person who throws mud at his neighbor can never have clean hands no matter his casus belli. People who claim to have clean hands are often those who have bad memories. To let an injury rankle in your bossom and to meditate revenge is to keep old wounds open and to make new ones. You will be sure to act unwisely if you fight your own battles. Letting our Rock of salvation do it is better than getting into petty quarrels and covering yourself with filth by wrestling with the unclean…. pigs and dogs. There is no need for vengeance since those with corrupt and wicked heart destroy themselves. A strong person does not seek revenge. He moves on with his life and lets karma do the dirty work.
If you fail to forgive, you are locking a door that you may need to unlock. The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst. In the divine court of justice, and under universal jurisprudence, when a man commits murder he becomes subject to death penalty. Killing the innocent is murder. The inhumanity of man towards man is the greatest sin of man. WAR means:- Wasting Available Resources. Before you win a war, you must have wasted time, money and human beings. There is no true winner in a war, all are losers. War does not determine who is right, only who is left. If you are going to war, you are going to kill or be killed. You are going to destroy or be destroyed. In either case, we (humanity) are suffering. We have money for war but cannot feed the poor. Pyrrhic or sanguinary victory causes sorrow. It is destroying yourself. The greatest victory is battle not fought. He who want to pursue revenge should first dig two graves. A fowl that swallows a needle will not live long to tell the story. Although a person who is destined to drown will drown even in a cup of water, but caution can postpone his death. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by it in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite. BEWARE OF DOGS. War is not good.
To escape the evil consequences of hatred, unforgiveness and revenge, we must learn to bear with one another, knowing that brothers at war can never be at peace with their father. If you want others to bear with you, you must learn to bear with them. Be quick to judge yourself, but be slow to judge others. The speck you see in your brother’s eye may be a reflection of the log in your own. Don’t complain about the refuse at your neighbour’s backyard when your own doorstep is unclean. Anyone who considers his own life with thoroughness and honesty will have no reason to judge another harshly. Instead of condemning people, let us try to understand them. Let us try to figure out why they do what they do and more, let us learn to be patient with them for even our Creator does not propose to judge a man until the end of his days. Do not criticize your brother, maybe he has done what you would do under similar circumstances. Your brother is still having this imperfect, weak flesh. Even the greatest pianist can produce perfect music only if he has a good piano. You and your brother are not there yet. The man who would understand others must first understand himself, for the motives which inspired him to action are the same which would inspire others to action under the same condition. Try to be patient in bearing the faults and weakness of other people, whatever they may be. Understand that we are all still under construction. Understand that you too have many faults which others have to endure. If you cannot make yourself the kind of person you desire, why expect it in someone else? We want perfection in other people, yet we do not have it in ourselves. We want to correct others but ourselves reject correction. We refuse people’s requests but want our own granted. We want people’s activities to be checked while we go unchecked. Always have an eye in the first place to yourself, and see that you give yourself advice or teaching before you give it to others. Don’t be aware of other’s obligations but fail to observe your own. Pray for true wisdom from above. It requires wisdom to understand wisdom. Any fool can complain, criticize and condemn as most fools do.
Negative actions often produce negative reactions. Even a toothless goat will bite if pressed hard on the wall. Do you blame the tortoise for walking so slowly, if you were carrying a house how quickly would you go? Don’t be a spectator who plays more than the player in the pitch. If you cannot tolerate another’s weakness, you are weak. “We who are strong” bear the infirmities of the weak. Tolerance is mark of maturity. You know that you are growing when you give up your right to “be right”. You are maturing when you are the first to apologize, the first to keep the peace, when you are the first to say, “what did I do wrong?” rather than nailing the other person to the wall for what he did to you. You evaluate yourself and say, “what did I do to that person, was there something that I did to provoke his or her response?”. Apologizing does not mean you are wrong and the other person is right. It only means that you value the relationship more than your ego.
Complaining always makes no difference, but tolerance would work wonders. I have learned that some of the things I resent about others are reflections of my own faults and I have been more tolerant since then. A needle’s eye is not too small for two lovers, but the whole world is not big enough for two enemies. Seek more to understand than to be understood. Seeking to know how to please my brother is better than seeking to know from where Cain got his wife. No one is perfect, we all have our inherited and cultivated good and evil tendencies. We are all huggable and buggable. Our Maker made it that way in order for us to be humble enough to seek His help always and to bear with one another’s fault with empathy.
Do not condemn one’s judgment because it differs from yours. You may both be wrong. How are you sure that what you think you know is correct? When everyone is wrong, everyone seems right. Turn away from things you don’t like or understand, and do not condemn them because they are fine as they are, only that they have no place in your life at the moment. People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness, just because they are not on your road does not mean they have gotten lost. All religions are good, yours only become wrong when you condemn mine. Life teaches a man to be moderate about the ideas which seem most certain and most important to him at any given moment.
If you are looking for faults to correct, try looking in a mirror. Correcting yourself is cheaper and safer. Soliloquizing is good if it is for self censure or a sermon to oneself. Talk to the man in the mirror, he needs repentance. Everybody wants to correct the world but nobody thinks of correcting himself. The speck you are seeing in your brother’s eye may be just a reflection of the log in your own eye. We are all guilty. He who is not guilty in this, is guilty in that. Whether in this or in that, we are all guilty. It is frequently easier to find fault than to find praise. Even in paradise, fault finders will find fault. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I. There are different kinds of people in this world, and you should not expect people to act or react to your speeches and actions in the same way. Vulture must always be vulture and hawk always hawk as goat must differ from sheep. He who goes out looking for faults will come home with a hand full of it for there is nothing under the sun we investigate that is without its own impurity. We all stumble in many things
Learn a lesson from the story of Ham, the son of Noah. He saw his father’s nakedness, he gazed upon his father’s fault with satisfaction, and told it to others with delight and flippancy instead of covering it. His two brothers were men of pure mind. They truly grieved at what befell their father—–not amused. They promptly sought to cover their father’s weakness (nakedness). With silent sorrow they rebuked their brother who delighted in seeing and telling of another man’s fall.
The chances of being able to find evil, sin or iniquity in any given individual is pretty great in these perilous days. We live in an evil age. If looking for sin and weakness in people is your ministry, then you have a lot of work to do. Sin is everywhere and in everyone. There is no way a man will wash his body with water, soap and sponge, that his body will be completely free from dirt; man is dust and must remain so until his change comes. (we shall all be changed). In every vessel is contained elements of evil, which circumstances would fan into life. Every human being is a potential criminal. Even the Holy one uses imperfect, immoral and dishonest people. In fact that is all there are these days. All the holy men have gone off and died. There is no one left but us sinners to carry on the ministry of the kingdom of heaven. Our Father is not looking for perfect people because they do not exist. We don’t become perfect and sinless the moment we are born again. True, our source of sin is cut off, but the human nature remains, and we always live with the dregs. There is always the remnant of that old life, meaning we must constantly repent. But more often, what these weak minds call fault is idiosyncrasies. All men are not the same. We all differ wildly in habits and dispositions. Variety is the beauty of our world. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most of the time, we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Our feeling about anything often affects the way we judge it, because it is easy to lose the faculty of honest judgment through self-interest. Judge not that you be not judged. Do not think yourself better than other men and set yourself up as their judge. Since you cannot discern motive, you are incapable of being the judge of another. In criticizing him, you are passing judgment upon yourself for you show that you are a participant with Satan, the accuser of brethren
One of the marks of a mature person is the ability to dissent without creating dissention. And even if there be faults and disagreements, the points in which we disagree are few while the points in which we agree are many. We can therefore forge ahead in peace and unity if we really want to. Unity is more beautiful in diversity. The tongue and the teeth quarrel yet they live together in the same mouth, working together for the good of the whole body. If two partners are always in agreement one of them is not necessary. It takes the white and black keys of the keyboard to play a nice music. And it takes the negative and positive wires to make the electric bulb to shine.
The word, “compromise”, may sound negative but it is unavoidable if we must get along with others. For the benefit of the flowers we water the thorns also. Those who love rose flower know that it has thorns. Where there is love there must be peace. It does not count faults. Love sees through a telescope, it is hatred that sees through the microscope. I do not mean being indulgent to sins. We should beware lest in seeking to prevent discord we surrender the truth. But while we are not to sacrifice one principle of truth, we should avoid controversy whenever it is possible to do so. Our error is that we fight for truths while destroying the people for whom the truths are made. Handling truth without grace is destructive. Even if you see another man openly doing wrong, or committing some fault, you should not consider yourself better than he is, for you do not know how long you can avoid a fall. We all stumble in many things. We are all weak, but you should consider yourself the weakest of all. He that judges another without mercy shall himself be also judged without mercy. Try to be full of grace. Those who are forward in accusing others, and zealous in bringing them to justice, are often in their own lives more guilty than them. They hate the sinner but love the sin. Every Saint has a past and every sinner has a future. All of us were born blind and rebels. We were born with our backs turned against our Maker. Did we not all, like Adam, run and hide from the Creator. A strong man shows his strength in the way he strengthens the weak. Do not make yourself miserable by expecting yourself or your brother to become an impossible person. Many people are on a journey from what they are not to what they cannot become. Man was not born perfect and cannot become perfect in this life. When temptation overcomes you, you will understand your own weakness. You must learn to live with these imperfections in order to enjoy the faith. When a good man makes mistake and make a bad move, it does not mean he is wicked, it only shows he is human. Being good does not mean being perfect. Apply common sense. Common sense is the ability to see things as they are and to do things as they ought to be done. Wisdom therefore is the abundance of common sense. It is the capacity of the human mind that allows us to understand life from the creator’s perspective. It is the ability to discern what is true and right. Greater percentage of the quarrels we have in the world is caused by misunderstanding. Lack of understanding is a plague to society. Pray for understanding. If you react to a foolish act in a foolish way, you have become a fool. In the bible, it is written: “if any of you lack wisdom…”. I think there should be no “if” there for we all lack wisdom. We often do very stupid things even in plain matters. Let common sense teach us that we all are houses under construction. Perfection could only be achieved when the work is done. Be sure that He Who began the good work in us will bring it to perfection. Young Joseph, as a young man at the age when physical desire is strong, by his reason quenched the impulse of his passions fanned by the display of a young beautiful woman. Reason is proved to subdue impulse not only of sexual desires, but of all sorts of evil works. Reason is in the position of a master over passion and affection. The temperate mind is able to conquer the dictates of passion, and to quench the fires of desire and to wrestle victoriously with the pangs of our bodies though they be exceedingly strong. It helps us to say NO to evil. The Divine Power dwells in the reason
Your erroneous method of approach may be the main cause of your neigbour’s misconduct and unbelief. You may be guilty of causing your brother to sin. Be careful not to sin by blaming a man in his anguish as the friends of Job did, nor rebuke someone who has already repented of his crime. The face is the index of the mind. People may not always tell you how they feel, but they will show it. Truth is made beautiful when presented in a direct and simple way, using a pure, refined language, clear as running water. Our infirmities maybe many, our sins and mistakes grievous, but the grace of the Almighty Father is for all broken hearts that seek it.
In the garden of Eden, the Most High asked Adam and Eve why they sinned but He did not ask Satan why he did what he did but quickly meted out His harsh judgment on him, to prove to man that whoever causes his brother to sin will be punished more than his brother that sinned. This is serious; think about it.
Joseph, the son of Jacob, revealed a divine truth when in Egypt he told his brothers: “You shall not see my face unless your brother is with you”. The Almighty Father hides His face from those who are quarreling. When you forgive, you don’t change the past, but you have saved the future. Many are in zealous religious services while between them and their brethren are unpleasant differences which they neglect to reconcile. In this life, conflict or contradiction is a commonplace experience even in individuals. No mater how high or how far the Spirit leads a man to new life, the conscience remains uneasy. In the development of new life, some contradictions between human self-will and the divine purpose remains. Peace in this life is never purely the peace of achievement but the serenity of having hope and faith in the Messiah. He is our peace. The Messiah is our great centre, and for His sake (because of faith and hope in Him), we must forgive one another. Let us do our things in such a way “that the Father may be glorified in the Son, (son)”
Let there be no strife……. For we are brethren.
-BKC YAHKA
Fools Insist On Quarrelling
