There is a piece of paper that has sat on my desk for the better part of a year. It sits by my phone, and I’ve been using it as a coaster for the last several months. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that the paper came to my attention when the humidity was high enough to staurate the poor thing.

On this piece of paper are written three requirements for organzational commitment on the part of the members of the organization. These factors are required for people to be and remain healthy members of any organization. This could be businesses, clubs, educational institutions, and churches.

I wish I could remember where I took this information from, but I failed to write it down. At any rate, here are the nuggets from my notepad turned coaster:

Affective organzational commitment cosists of three factors:
- A belief in the goals and values of the organization.
- A willingness to put forth effort on behalf of the organization.
- A desire to remain a member of the organization.

How do these factors play in where you are?

So far we’ve looked at conflict as a point in space/time as well as a line that connects the two parties.  I’m sure you could hear me tripping out about the bonds that hold people together in conflict.

This next part is the most mentally stimulating of the competing forces thus far.  Unfortunately, it is also going to be the one that is most difficult for me to get out of my head, so bear with me as I try to get this out.

For starters, viewing conflict as a line is also about as incomplete as viewing conflict as a point in space/time.  That is because parties are constantly moving and changing.  Conflicts are not static, but rather are living and active and have substance to them.  A more complete approach would be to begin to rotate the line drawn between the two parties, spinning the line into a circle revolving around the conflict.

The neatest part to this approach is the way the competing centripital and centrifugal forces can be seen.  These forces are naturally occuring physical forces that play off of each other to determine momentum and direction.  One way to understand these forces is to imagine a roller coaster on the tracks headed toward a loop.  When the direction of the track is curved upward to begin the loop, centripital force is applied.  The corresponding centrifugal force pushes the cart down to the track and, subsequently, the contents of the cart (you and me, screaming at the top of our lungs).  These forces can also be seen in our teen filled mini-van that takes a corner too sharp or fast.  The left-hand turn of the van causes all of the weight of the teens to slide to the right, punishing the poor guy at the end of the bench.

This is important in conflict because it reveals the additional conflict of tendency vs. solution.  The solution to our conflicts lie at the heart of the matter, the place where we impact the other person.  The centripital force of the parties rotating around the conflict, however, generates the opposing centrifugal force that pushes us away from the center.  The natural tendency, then, is for us to avoid the conflict and bypass the issue.  The bond of conflict, however, keeps us rotating around the center, simultaneously holding us in place and pulling us away at the same time.  No wonder we feel so messed up when we are in conflict.

The solution to these conflicts require us to fight our way to the center, to the place where we are bonded to each other, and really come to a true resolution.  Only this frees us from the cycle of competing forces and allows us to restore peace to our lives.

Yesterday I wrote about viewing conflict as a simple point in space, which you should read before you decide to read this post, most importantly because this post will consist mostly of an expansion on that topic.

Viewing our conflicts as a point in space is easy and simple and is attractive for many reasons.  Not only does it make give us a self-centered and easily manipulated view of our conflicts, but it also allows us to ignore the fact that our conflicts involve other people.  In fact, this simple view of conflict allows us to completely avoid and simultaneously demonize the other people with which we experience conflict.  A better, and more accurate, view of conflict acknowledges the other parties as being an important part of conflicts.  At this point I would probably get a big “DUH!” followed by a “They’re the ______ that caused my problem.”  Acknowledging the other party goes beyond that, however.

When we’re engaged in conflict with another person, we should have a certain level of respect for the other person.  Joey Cope introduced the topic of “reverence” into our discussions.  Of all the reasons we could give to encourage reverence towards others in conflict, the most convincing to me is the understanding of the role the other person plays in our conflict.  Not only are they party to the creation of the conflict, they are necessary for a successful resolution to the conflict as well.  Think about that!  The person you are in conflict with is valuable to you because you cannot restore peace to the situation without their cooperation.  It is as if conflict with the person bonds us together in a relationship where our own success depends on the person we may be most angry with.  LOST fans out there will recognize the slogan “Live together, die alone.”  If we truly want a healthy resolution to our conflict, we need the other person as much as we need ourselves.  In order to resolve the force that is pushing us away from each other we must move closer together.  What a trip!

Going back to our philosophical/geometrical view of conflict, we can expand on the idea of conflict as not only a point in space/time (which it sort of is) to being a point is space/time to which both parties are attached.  The parties extend from the conflict in their opposite directions, which expands the concept of our conflict to a two-dimensional line connecting the two parties.  Both parties are bound to each other as long as the conflict remains unresolved, neither one is fully able to let go until both resolve to.  Even if one chooses to avoid the conflict or not engage the other party, there is an invisible connection that binds them still to the issue.

This view of conflict is still incomplete, however.  Tomorrow we’ll put the conflict in motion and look at the part that has me the most geeked out.

Until then, how have you seen this two party description in play?  For me, I’ve seen it in unrepentent offenders.  We’ve all had our share of people that harm us and choose to not acknowledge it.  You want to restore the relationship, but are unable to because they won’t even acknowledge that they are a party to the same conflict that you are.  What other examples or thoughts can you add?

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve recently completed a practical skills and theory course in conflict.  Lots of thoughts have been swimming around in my head since then.  We covered a lot of material from different vantage points.  Of all of this, the one thing that stood out most to me was the competing forces that exist within conflict.  I’ll write a couple posts on this, which will be paraphrasing information and material that I’m borrowing from my classmates, professors, and readings for the course.

The first force that I observed in our discussions on conflict is the power of perception.  The way we view a conflict has great impact on how the conflict affects us and on how we will handle ourselves and the conflict as we work our way through it.  Conflict can be seen as something evil that should be avoided, or can be viewed as an opportunity for growth.

Specifically, the philosophical way we view conflict is very important.  Most people will view conflict as a punctiliar event or a specific point in space/time.  Thinking geometrically, this perception would view conflict as a singular point in space.  Viewing conflict this way allows us to treat the conflict as a specific event and allows us to describe it as such.  For example, viewing conflict as a point in space gives us the ability to avoid it if we choose.  We can walk around it just like we walk around a piece of furniture or we can store it in a cabinet like a souvenir from our latest vacation.  We can look at it, use it, or avoid it all together.

Viewing conflict as a point in space also allows us to use a very self-centered approach to describing our conflict.  This over-simplified approach to our conflict enables us to consider our perception as the only one that matters.  Since a point is space is easy to name and observe, we can easily place blame on others and be confident in our recollection of events and happenings. Our perception becomes the only one that matters.

While there are certain aspects to conflicts that are specific in space/time, viewing conflict in this way ignores the relational aspect of conflict.  If our desire is to resolve only the specific space/time aspects of a conflict, this is the highest level of philosophical complexity that is required.  For example, if I am injured and my car is damaged in a car crash I may choose to ignore any future relationship with the other person and seek to settle my conflict through litigation.  Myself and the other person will have our perceptions of the space/time event presented to a judge/jury and will have a decision made on our behalf.  A majority of our conflicts, however, will be better served by being resolved with a greater consideration given to the relational value in conflict.

Tomorrow I’ll talk more about that, but I’ll leave you with a true story from today that reveals some of the problems of viewing conflict as a point in time.  One of my BIGGEST pet peeves is when the remote controls go missing in our house.  When a remote disappeared today, I instructed the boys to do nothing else until they found the missing remote.  None of them seemed to have it last, so they were all in it together.  When I came back into the room, I found two children involved in a conflict.  Specifically, one child, red faced, had the other child by the wrist and was staring him down while saying, “Boy… you better get control of yourself and I’m NOT kidding.”  Having been a parent for a combination of 39 years, I knew that they would each have a different account of what had happened that led to this particular situation.

What problems do you see with viewing this conflict as a specific, point in space kind of conflict?

I’m sitting in my back yard right now. I don’t do this often, but right now I’m really taking in the beauty. It’s 11:00 pm. The fire in the pit is slowly burning down. I’m on fire patrol, so everyone else has gone inside. The sky is filled with stars. The woods are filled with fireflies. It is really beautiful.

We had a yard full of people tonight. Friends and family from Bristol Road Church of Christ. We had originally planned a cookout for the young adults, but none of them remembered about it since I was gone the last few weeks and didn’t remind them. So, we punted and invited a others to join us. They’ve all left now, but the auras of their laughter and love remain.

I’ve been rather disenchanted with the concept of “church” for the last few years, but this evening came pretty close to what I think it should be. Fellow Christians spending time together, rejoicing about successes (one of our unemployed guys was accepted into a school he was hoping for), sharing hard times, casual discussions about God, forgiveness, discipleship, and desperately wanting to be more like Jesus.

If communion can be done with burgers and dogs instead of sips of juice and bits of cracker, we had a great church service tonight.

I had an awesome week in Abilene, TX for the practical skills and theory course with the Center for Conflict Resolution at Abilene Christian University. Currently, I’m sitting in an aiport in Chicago with all sorts of thoughts and ideas swirling around in my head. I’ll process some of those out during the week.

I have one more seven-week course, which begins Monday, and I will have completed the requirements for the Masters in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation. I’m pretty excited about that. More importantly, I’m excited about future opportunities to help bring peace to the lives of people.

To Joey Cope, Garry Bailey (eh?), Matthew Dodd, Lori Ann Shaw, Pam Horn, Dr. Strader, and all of my fellow students, and whomever else I’ve left out, thanks for an awesome life and paradigm changing week!

Now that you’ve been inticed to read, let me set up a little back story.  I flew to Abilene, Texas on Sunday morning to be a part of a practical skills and theory course in conflict.  The day prior, the power went out in the house around 1:00 in the afternoon.  Wife and I went to see two movies to wait for the power to come back on, but it never did.  Around 11:00 p.m., we gave up and went to bed.  The power was restored around 2:00 a.m., and I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the airport on time for my flight to Abilene.

About 10 hours and 300 pages of reading later, I arrived at ABI and was transported to ACU.  I’m staying in the University Park apartments, which are furnished apartments near/on campus.  They don’t provide linens, but some wonderful saints in town provided some to me so I didn’t have to.  I stayed up a few more hours to do some work, and seriously considered going to bed around 8:30 p.m.  I’m VERY glad that I didn’t.

Around 11:00 p.m. that evening my roommate showed up.  I had left the door unlocked, which confused my roommate since they expected it to be locked and used their key to turn the lock cylinder.  Of course, since it was unlocked it really only locked the door, which my roommate then tried to open.  I then heard the key attempting to enter the cylinder again to unlock it, but I could tell the person was having trouble getting the key in the lock.  At this point I found myself in an awkward situation.  I had already allowed so much time without offering assistance that it would be weird offering it now.  Also, the longer I waited the greater the probability that my roommate would succeed.  If that success occurred with me reaching for the door it would look a little creepy, like perhaps I was turning the locks or holding the door from the inside.  After a few more seconds, I finally gave in and approached the door.

As I had previously deducted, just as I reached for the door my roommate was successful and pushed the door in with me standing a few inches inside.  We simultaneously let out gasp/shrieks of surprise, not because we weren’t expecting someone but because we were expecting someone else.  It turned out, my roommate was a GIRL.

Now, I didn’t really process this before, but at the moment I was pretty wrapped up in my own perspective.  Imagine for a moment that you were this lady trying to get in the door, though.  It was late.  She happened to be from Nigeria and had traveled 30 hours by plane to get here (her ethnic name was mistaken as being that of a male).  And there, in the door of her apartment was a man.  Not just any man, mind you, but Big Bad Brad.  I’ve known a few Nigerians in my day, but none my size, which must have been freaky.  Add in the fact that I was wearing a white undershirt and gray athletic shorts and you’ve got the makings of a B horror movie.

After the shock wore off, I chuckled and said, “This isn’t going to work.”  We tried to find the RA while I called to arrange a back up place to stay just in case we couldn’t get her a different room.  We were successful in getting her a new room, but she was very worried about her bag, which she had left on the third floor of the apartments outside my door.  She was assigned to a different building, so being the gentleman that I am, I offered to deliver it to her new apartment, also on the third floor.  I was not expecting her bag to weigh 1.3 million pounds, however, and struggled with it all the way to the new place.  While I wasn’t trying to be impressive, there is definitely no “knight in shining armor” quality to a 300 lb man who is sweating in the Texas heat and can’t catch his breath.  I managed to gasp out, “Here’s your bag”, but in not being able to control my lungs I think I yelled it in a gremlin-esque voice, which probably just added the cherry to the top of her new, multi-cultural experience.

In retrospect, not going to bed early was the best thing I could have done. The beds in the apartment are in separate rooms that share a living room.  Could you imagine our surprise if the first time we met was not at the doorway but rather in the living room as we left for class?  That would be a hard story to explain.  Almost as hard to explain as Randy Wray walking in on a girl in the shower in San Diego.

Those who know me will attest that I’ve been on a rather strange kick about church over the last year or so.  Specifically, I’ve become disenchanted with what we call “church” and have become frustrated with how little resemblance there is between what we see in the New Testament about church and what most of our churches look like.  I’m also experiencing an identity crisis of sort because of successes with church growth.  Does that sound weird?  My problem is that it is relatively easy to grow a church.  What is not easy is growing disciples.  My successes, while good at growing churches, have not had the same results with disciples.

For the last few months I’ve been on an introspective journey about what church should look like.  I don’t know the answers, but I do know that our tendency to focus on the external features of “church” is pervasive and difficult to overcome.  It is the natural tendency for us to resort back to what we know, and what we know is not very healthy for growing spiritually deep congregations.  It seems attempts to focus on the deeply spiritual things about church and discipleship don’t make a lot of sense to people that are immersed in a consumerist mentality, so speaking those types of words make me feel like I’m speaking a totally different language.

I got a haircut today, which I do about every 3-5 months.  I’ve used the same hair-cutter-person (what do you call a person that cuts a guys hair that isn’t a barber?  Beautician doesn’t sound right, and I definitely don’t want to say “my beautician”) since we’ve moved here, partly because I’m a creature of habit and partly from “intentional consumerism”, which some of you will remember from an evangelism strategy course you may have taken.  She is a married mother of two young children and is active in the church she grew up in.  She runs the food pantry there and has been over to tour and work at our food and clothing distribution ministry a couple times.

Understand, I’ve never tried to recruit her for our church.  I think Christians are found in lots of churches, not just ours, so to know she was plugged in somewhere was great.  Quite abruptly in the midst of our conversation, however, she said, “I’m bored with church.”  She said she’s considering trying another congregation.  She loves knowing everyone at her church and knows that the food pantry would probably close if she left, but “church” doesn’t seem real to her and she is bored.  She felt guilty for saying and feeling it, but also felt good to talk to someone about it.

I still didn’t recruit her or tell her to come check us out.  She knows she is welcome if she wants to visit.  Our church has warts, too, and I honestly don’t know how well our warts and her warts line up.  The thing that struck me, though, is how pervasive issues with church health are, no matter the denomination.

I was simultaneously sad and thrilled at our discussion.  Sad in that I knew what it meant to be disillusioned with church.  Thrilled, though, that the Spirit was moving in her and pointing her toward something bigger and more real than she’s experienced in the body of Christ.

Maybe if we all get bored we can get together and do something about it.

This questions has caused me more trouble than I care to admit. I never felt a strong pull toward what “I am supposed to be”. I’ve joked recently with people my age and older that we still don’t know what we want to be when we grow up. I imagine we’ll figure out one day.

For the last several months, and maybe from the beginning of this blog, my blog has been asking the same question. The focus for my blog has meandered from family to ministry to leadership. It’s tried to balance between personal anecdotes and lessons or devotionals for a more general public. The poor little blog is even torn between whether to be spiritual or technological in nature. Talk about an identity crisis.

After giving it much thought, my blog is not suffering from an identity crisis. My blog is suffering from being too much like its creator: me. As many of us experience, my life is a balancing act between competing agendas. I am simultaneously an individual consumed with my own wants and desires as well as a parent/husband/church leader whose primary responsibility is for the care for others. I am pulled between things I want to do and things I need to do. I walk daily in the gray area between the spiritual and the physical. Throw in a little bit of ADD, infrequent bouts of fatigue and depression, and an ability to be amused and entertained by things that others consider silly and you’ve got the makings for one random life.

As such, I have decided what this blog is supposed to be. As narcissistic as it may sound, this blog is about me. It is about my challenges and my triumphs. It is about my successes and failures. It is about my attempt to do the best I can to make it through this world that we live in without messing things up too badly. That walk includes lessons God is teaching me and will include other characters that share the stage of life with me.  Sometimes those lessons will have a broad focus and sometimes narrow.  The characters may be friends, family, or strangers.  One thing this blog will not be is fake.  You’ll get the real Brad, and hopefully you’ll find him a little charming.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me!

After what has been a rather long hiatus, bradpalmore.com is back in action.  Not only does it have a new theme, but the technology behind the blog is all new as well.  This blog is sitting on a fresh installation of WordPress 2.7.1 that was just upgraded to 2.8.  The database is fresh and free from all of the clutter left from the pre-WordPress 2.0 days.

My plugins are all new as well.  You’ll notice some of them right away, like the little “ShareThis” tag at the bottom of the post to let you easily share blog entries with others or the little “New” icon next to the blog entries you haven’t read yet.  The links in the sidebar area also nested to save space.  One thing I messed up in deleting the old blog was not copying my links before I did so.  If you want your link added, let me know in the comments.

The pages have been streamlined.  The “About Me” page has a new bio and the “Contact Me” page now has more contact options.  I’ll be adding pages on church health, mediation, and resources that I’ve produced in the coming weeks, so check back.

There are some additional things I’ll highlight as we go along.  Thanks for checking in with us again and for tolerating the shut down for as long as you did!