Conflict

Found this beautiful quotation in my research. Love it.

"To be who we are - creators in the image of the Creator - we must be actively engaged in the setting free of every other person to be who she or he is intended: someone different from who we are, someone who will see the world from another perspective, someone who will not agree with us. Anything short of such liberation is suppressive and destructive and ultimately death producing...

Conflict is not just inevitable, as we are prone to say wisely and with a sigh of resignation. Instead it is part of the divine plan, a gift. Disruption is integral to God's order. Conflict sometimes provides us with energy, insight, and new possibility as reluctant by-products; newness cannot come without conflict. It is not a price to be paid and endured, but a condition to be sought and welcomed and nurtured...

To manage conflict then would be to allow it, not to suppress it; to open our doors and windows to its fresh wind. Following this line of thought to its ultimate conclusion, violence and war become not conflict run amuck, conflict out of all bounds, but the final outcome of conflict quelled. They result when we will not allow the other to be different, when we deny our life-giving dependence on the different one with all our might and means." - Caroline Westerhoff