Hey Covenant Groupies,
Kevin and I had a disagreement that turned to an argument today and throughout, I tried to remain clear headed and patient, but I felt myself becoming emotional and angry. We were both becoming exasperated with the conversation. He’s trying to explain his point, but in his explanation, he’s becoming accusatory. I’m asking how I can better help in this particular situation and I felt he wasn’t hearing me. We were not communicating effectively and God was not being honored at all. Kevin decided to end the argument, which always angers me; why do we seem to always give in to the heat of the moment? As soon as I walked away the Holy Spirit dumped into my spirit James Why do we fight…because we do not get what we want?”
What did I want? What did Kevin want? We both had a GOAL and a DESIRE, but we took the wrong route to get what was needed. Although our goal is identical, it was our desires that we were truly fighting over. He was trying to force an emotional response out of me and I was trying to be heard; neither of us were effective because our strategies were selfish and not selfless.
Why do we communicate? More than likely, in our human-ness, it’s to manipulate, but God wants us to communicate in order to minister and that starts with honesty. We must first be honest about the situation and how it’s made us feel. Emotional anger and righteous anger are certainly not the same; yet we’ll fight over emotional anger because it’s about us. We’ll fight for hours; even years. It’s fleshly and stupid – not our emotions, but how we go about communicating them to one another. Righteous anger is not so easy and not too many barge the front line in order to fight that fight, because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with us. It’s supernatural and it’s always about someone else being mistreated. How do you fight on that person’s behalf when you’re the one mistreating? It doesn’t require you to stand toe-to-toe with another person using the word “I” at all. It’s not manipulation; it’s ministry.
I understand that men and women do communicate differently. I also understand that we fight over and for the same things – self preservation, but I believe couples truly touch the heart of God when we properly assess our goals, our desires and specifically why we’re communicating. Goals are objectives we work towards and desires are those very intricate things in our relationship that we really need from our spouses, but we fall so easily into manipulating our needs from our spouses as oppose to praying about them.
When our needs are met we are available to be all that our spouses need; when our desires are met we are available to feel significant and whole with and for our spouse.
Our communication has to always point towards God’s purposes in our marital relationship, not just getting our needs met. God is the great provider of our needs; we should never try to manipulate our loved ones; it’s happens too easily and too often.
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