Conflict

This seems to be an ever occurring theme in my life, can you identify?  I have to say that the past few weeks have been exhausting in this area and to the point where I wanted to flee from it all.  Interestingly enough this weekend our message in church was on Conflict and how to deal with it in a Biblical way. The most Natural way to deal with conflict is Aggressive- Head on or Passive- Flee.  Well I am here to tell you that I have tried both approaches to conflict and neither of these ways work for very long.  They always find a way to resurface and make more conflict then if it were dealt with properly the first time.  In the message on Sunday, Todd said "God is more concerned about growing you up then giving you a problem free life."  Wow! Wow! Wow!  I have never looked at conflict this way, in all honesty I usually looked at the other persons issues and would pray for them after it was all over.  I never really looked at it from this point of view, where God could be using this very thing to work on me.  But, what if the other person is 100% wrong?  God is still more concerned with me and how I handle conflict, whether I do the most natural thing that comes to me or I take that time to see what God has to say about it in his Word.  Sometimes conflict can be avoidable and other times it isn't but too often we look at the other person involved and say God please fix them instead of looking to God to see what we are to learn out of it.  I was reading this morning in Psalms 34:19 "A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all."  We are never promised a problem free life but we are promised that the Lord will deliver us from it, we cannot look to ourselves to be delivered by fleeing from it or lashing out.  Sometimes conflict last awhile, or it comes and goes but do we really take God at his Word?  It's easy to lose hope but Psalms 27:5 says "Wait on the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord."  I am preaching to myself here because I needed to be reminded of these truths lately and I hope that they also encourage you!