In 2021 a mayor in St. Cloud, Florida reached across a dinner table and took a single french fry off the plate of a political rival. The rival called the police, filed battery charges, and set off a criminal investigation that had detectives pulling restaurant footage before it was thrown out as ridiculous. It is easy to laugh at that, right up until you remember the look someone gave you last month, or the group photo you were not in, or the sentence you have replayed nine times looking for the insult inside it. So before we decide how to confront something, there is an earlier question most of us skip. Does this even need to be a conflict?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDvLUAMQhv8
The Question Before The Confrontation
Scripture never tells us to ignore sin, and there are moments when love walks straight at a problem. But somewhere between something happened and I have to address this, a wise person leaves room for thought. “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (). Notice what that verse calls glory. Not winning the argument, but the ability to let something go and keep walking. Paul aimed at the same posture, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (). Pride, and the behavior that follows it, threatens peace more than most of the offenses we get worked up about.
Do I Actually Understand This
The first honest question is whether I understand the thing bothering me. Is this sin, or something I simply do not like? Did this person violate God’s will, or my expectations? Paul spent a whole chapter on that distinction, taking real convictions seriously while refusing to let anyone turn a private conviction into a measuring stick for everyone else (). Then there are the plain facts. “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (). Any parent knows this, the child arriving with a full account of the wrong done to them, and the witness who fills in the half you were not told. Do I know what happened, or am I reacting to the version I was handed?
There is a doctrinal version too. Am I defending God’s truth, or the way I have always understood it? Admitting that my reading is an act of interpretation is not relativism, it is what serious Bible study looks like.
Do I Understand Myself
The second question is harder, because the subject is me. Am I slow here, or is this an emotional reaction looking for justification? Paul told those restoring someone caught in sin to do it “in a spirit of gentleness, keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (). Keep watch on yourself. Why does this bother me so much? None of us walks into a situation clean. We arrive carrying family background, past congregations, old fears, teachers we admired, and all of it shapes what we notice. The question is not whether I have biases. I do, and so do you. It is whether I recognize them well enough to hold them under God’s word.
Then, motive. If I confront this person, do I want them restored, or a little embarrassed so I look better by comparison? Marriage exposes this faster than anything. Cataloging a spouse’s faults is easy and helps nothing. Seeing my own contribution helps.
What Love Actually Requires
The third question decides it. Not what would feel satisfying, but what love requires. Sometimes I can overlook this, and suggests that is often where wisdom points. But overlooking has a real meaning. It is not absorbing the offense and then gossiping about it, keeping score for later, or quietly putting someone on probation so they stop getting invited. “Love covers all offenses” (), and “for lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases” (). To overlook something is to stop feeding it. We do this constantly with a spouse, with friends, with our children, and we are right to.
Sometimes the answer is no. If I know I will resent this person in six months, overlooking it is not love, it is avoidance. Paul reached that conclusion himself. He would have liked to keep Onesimus with him, but a real wrong sat unresolved, so he sent him home to Philemon and wrote, “If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account” (). That is a man treating a problem as a genuine mountain and absorbing the cost himself so two brothers could be right with each other. Jesus said it plainly, go to your brother and tell him (). Where there is real sin and real harm, silence is not kindness.
When The Response Becomes The Real Problem
Here is the warning worth carrying home. How I handle the issue can end up more serious than the issue was. Think of the times a small matter turned into gossip, anger, and finally broken fellowship. The offense was a molehill. Pride became the mountain. Anger became the mountain. Division became the mountain. Which is why the wise man sounds so wise. Do not run to the elders when someone takes your fry.
Most of what wounds us is misunderstanding anyway. Someone had a terrible day, glanced over mid-sentence, and we read a verdict into their face. So when something will not let go, the courageous thing is a conversation. What did you mean by that? Have I upset you somehow? Love sometimes requires the courage to say we need to talk, and sometimes the maturity to say this does not need to become a conflict. Paul asked us to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” () because it does not happen by accident. The greatest threat to fellowship is often not the offense. It is our inability to tell a mountain from a molehill.
