A friend of mine posted something interesting on Facebook today. I'll just copy and paste the gist of her status (it's pretty long!) and my reply. :)

I enjoy debating, for the most part. I really do. It doesn't mean I'm always in the mood for it, or logical about it, or have the time for it, and there are some topics that I would rather avoid, but overall, I think I learn so much from respectful exchanges of ideas, though sometimes what I've had to learn (through trial and error) is simply how to have a respectful exchange of (opposing) ideas in the first place.

But some people don't like debating at all. I can remember quite clearly during college, two different instances with two different groups of friends, where a couple of us were having a friendly back-and-forth over an issue, and one friend (different person in each case) got really uncomfortable with that, to the point of asking us to stop. Not because of the topic but because they really just "wanted us to be friends" and wanted us to get along, while in our minds our friendship was in no way threatened by having a disagreement.

It's funny how two people can view the same thing so completely differently. And I have to wonder how many misunderstandings that gives rise to. I didn't really see it at the time, but my friends were not calling for an end of the debate because they didn't love us or were annoyed with us -- it was because they *did* love us and believed they were helping us to get along.

In the same way, I think some people see things like debate and a willingness to challenge as a sign of love. It's not always easy -- sometimes you're worried about getting on someone's bad side but decide you like and respect them enough that you're willing to take that risk in order to share what you believe to be the truth (or at least a more accurate angle on a topic). So in that case, sometimes challenging someone's viewpoint can be done out of love just as much as trying to "keep the peace" can be...

Perhaps it's a case of some people seeing "the truth" before peace and harmony, with others seeing peace and harmony before "the truth," when they're actually both important, it's just that a lot of us lean more to one direction than another.

Thoughts? Do you fall more to one side? (Or do you think I've presented a false dichotomy and want to challenge me on it? ;-) ) And if so, how do you work toward treating others respectfully even when you may see "debating" from such different perspectives?

My response:

"You just described me and Stephen to a T! I grew up in a sensitive family that is hugely conflict-avoidant. Stephen and his family, on the other hand, are thinkers and love to hash things out with each other, and tend to address conflicts immediately. It's totally foreign to me. As you can imagine, this presented some huge problems in the first few years of our marriage.

"What I have learned is that in some ways my family's peace-at-all-costs policy has only worsened the pain, because nothing ever gets talked about and everything gets shoved under the nearest rug, and people just suffer in silence and try to forgive each other. BUT I also understand that many of them carry deep hurts from things in their lives that I don't even know about, and so much of their lives is just trying to survive without getting hurt again or more.

"Now that I know this, it's really quite a terrible dilemma to be in. I want to tell them that burying pain is not the answer, but I know all I can do is pray and pray and pray for them, because people with hurts that deep don't get healed any other way.

"Stephen has learned to be somewhat gentler with me and maybe give me a little time, and I have learned to be more open about my feelings. It was in NO WAY easy to get there and sometimes when I'm really hurt, I still hole up. But we always manage to get things talked out. God is so good. <3"

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