DUCKS’ BACKS OR SPONGES

 “Do not hate your brother in your heart.  Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.”  Leviticus 19:17

 “Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil…seek peace, and pursue it.”  Psalm 34:12-14

Choosing the right path to true peace—discerning between peacemaking and peacefaking— is not always easy.  Just knowing that sometimes we must confront, even though it is uncomfortable, doesn’t solve all the problems that go along with trying to be wise. 

 If we move too quickly in one direction— speak our minds as a sort of knee-jerk reaction— we might be plagued with regret for the rest of our days for spouting off things we didn’t really mean after a while. 

If we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, sometimes, even if it doesn’t roll away, we listen to the Evil One as he uses one or more of several tactics to convince us not to go back and revisit this Thing with our sister or brother.  (Many of us err in the first way because we are the type who know from past experience that if we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, we might once again end up despising ourselves for our fearful or slothful paralysis.) 

How do we grow a heart of wisdom in this matter so that we will neither react “knee-jerkfully” nor allow the devil to falsely placate us into a deadly malaise that will surface in some bizarre way down the road?  My friend Candy calls this bizarre kind of surfacing “coming out sideways.” That paints a pretty graphic picture, doesn’t it?

Something that has worked for me is the Jericho solution.  When some hurt lingers until the next day and I am tempted to “speak my piece” as a means of finding my peace, I begin praying specifically and purposefully about it for seven days.  After this weeklong prayer vigil, I will notice that I am either greatly prompted to have the discussion or else the thing has faded from bright red to pale pink, and the sharp edges have been whittled down to a smoothness that no longer has pricking power.  

 

Whether we can be a duck’s back about an offense or for some reason can’t help being a sponge about it is important for us to learn and admit to ourselves. Somewhere in our anger and hurt, we might have missed the possibility that we have likewise been part of the offense. 

If we don’t deal honestly with ourselves and our brothers and sisters, we might miss the possibility that we, too, have offended, and according to the spirit of Matthew 5:23-24, our gifts to our Father will not be accepted.  What a terrible plight!  We must be diligent to pray to be delivered from such costly deception.