What do you say to people who might be feeling guilty because their families, their marriages, their relationship with children or parents is not characterized 100% by the absence of conflict?

I love Jesus' words in Matthew 5, 9, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

He has these little phrases that he uses, we often refer to them as Beatitudes, that give a picture of what God's kingdom looks like on earth.

And one of the phrases he uses there is, blessed are the peacemakers, they'll be called children of God.

One of the things that that verse presupposes is that actually conflict will be part of our experience here on earth.

As followers of Jesus, conflict is actually going to be part of our daily experience.

What should distinguish Christians is not the absence of conflict, but rather our response to it.

So what can you tell us about the importance of this third topic, disagreeing well as a couple?

Would you be able to explain that again for those who are listening this time? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we refer to this as a tool, which we refer to as a slippery slope.

So if you imagine a semicircle and we divide that into three wedges in the middle wedge, we have what we refer to as our peacemaking responses.

But if we slide down, say, the left-hand side, we hit what we then refer to as our peace-faking responses.

They're the escape responses.

They're the things like we've run away.

It's like where it says, what's the quick way to do that?

Great

... because they've seen it.

So we want to address everyone involved.

Uh, we want to be able to then avoid some words that just are notorious for blowing up apologies.

So words like if, but, and maybe, they're words that kind of try to justify what we did.

"If only you hadn't have done..." We end up blaming the other person.

So we want to address everyone, avoid the ifs, the buts, and the maybes.

Mm.