Confrontation

An article by Don Quixote    1 Comment

Confrontation: The act of confronting or the state of being confronted, especially a meeting face to face.

Confront: To come face to face with, especially with defiance or hostility: I wish to confront my accuser in a court of law. To bring face to face with: The defendant was confronted with incontrovertible evidence of guilt. To come up against; encounter: confronted danger at every turn.

I’m not a big confrontation kind of guy. Just like death, I hate it in fact. I hate how my body gets all shaky, my voice sort of quivers, my face gets red. That place in between being scared and enraged. That conscience thought in the back of your head that you know you are upset, and therefore you need to be even more careful. The gut instinct to just react instead of stop and think.

But I think what I hate the most is that queasy feeling you have inside when you are all done, even if you did your best to make sure things ended on a positive or semi-positive note, you still just feel icky on the inside.

I feel icky now.

I had one of those confrontational moments with a Dean here at the college. I wouldn’t say it got heated, but I was really upset. Sometimes I let myself get a little carried away. The best moment was when he said, “Do you know who I am?” As if somehow I should be impressed that he was a Dean, or that he was beyond normal rules and or guidelines; to which I responded, “Do you know who I am?”

But now all the heated words are over and I feel bad. I did the right thing in what I did, and I even think that how I went about it was the right thing to do. I think the biggest reason is that I wanted to confront him. I wanted someone to put this guy in his place and let him know that he couldn’t just walk all over whoever, demanding his way. I mean this was a guy who starts by introducing himself as, “Someone who normally gets what he wants and then some.” Someone needed to take this guy down a few pegs.

There in lies the rub; the heart of the matter, or rather the matter of my heart.
There are a lot of times in this life when we do the right things for all the wrong reasons. We ruin the good that we seek to accomplish because of the motivations of our heart. Our truth becomes a weapon, our correction becomes a way to tear down, our generosity becomes a slap in the face, our compliments, condescension.

I think I read somewhere once, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

It’s not enough to go through all the right motions, they must be of substance. In the end, it will be our heart’s intent that matters most, not the actions of our hands.

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers–or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”