Every once in a while, my wife and I will have a disagreement. Generally speaking, they tend to be small things, but our conversation can get heated at times.
It’s very strange to me how stubborn I can get (dare I say my wife as well) about things sometimes. And I often find myself fighting pride, not wanting to give in to her.
Just as an example, on our baby stroller, there are some straps with hooks on them that will naturally just slide down the sides of the stroller handle if you don’t make a conscious effort to hold them where they are.
(When there’s no bag or something on them holding them together, anyway).
One time, my wife got really annoyed with me because I let the straps go down yet again and left them there until she used the stroller the next day. (In my defense, she’d never mentioned it before).
From my standpoint, it was a very small thing. So it falls down. It takes all of 2 seconds to push them back up again. Who cares? Apparently, my wife did.
Still, my thinking was, “If it takes two seconds, and she really cares about it, she should just push it up.”
It took God’s little voice saying, “If it takes two seconds, why don’t you just push them back up before you put the stroller away,” to get me to stop the argument and to start changing my habits.
Yep, pride can be a pretty nasty thing in these kinds of arguments.
Abram’s dispute with Lot was much bigger. The land couldn’t support the two of them, and it was causing a huge problem between their men.
Abram had every right as the leader in the family to say, “Get lost Lot. I get first pick of the land, and I’m going this way.”
There could’ve been a big dispute over the land, but instead, Abram said, “Hey, we’re close relatives. This isn’t worth arguing about. There’s a lot of land. You choose where you want to go, and I’ll go the other way.”
And when Lot chose what looked to be the better land, Abram didn’t argue; he just said, “God bless” and left. And what’s more, God blessed him for it.
How much better would life be if when we’re arguing about something, we say, “Look we’re friends. You’re my husband. You’re my wife. Our relationship is much more important than our dispute. So I’ll bend on this because I love you.”
How much better would our lives be if we could just let pride go, and as the apostle Paul said:
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. (Ephesians 5:21)
How much of the Lord’s blessing would we find in our relationships, if we would learn to do that?
Moment to Moment (Bible blog) 