Thinking About Picking a Fight Today? Read This.

Here is an excerpt from Unpacking Forgiveness.  If (1) You are in the initial stages of an argument or, (2) If you think Matthew 18:15-17 are the only verses in the Bible, then read this.

A Sad, Ridiculous Story

It started out simply, as complicated things often do.  On a night long ago, Denis O’Brien walked into a restaurant called the Mousetrap.  [He] was looking for friends, and when he found them, he turned to walk out.

A cashier stopped him.  Apparently O’Brien had misplaced a red tab that the restaurant issued to its customers to keep track of their food and drinks.  The Mousetrap required a $5 fee for lost tabs, O’Brien was told.

It could have ended there, but it didn’t. O’Brien could have paid the fee, but he wouldn’t. The restaurant could have let him go, but it wouldn’t. Instead, the dispute escalated over a decade into a series of suits and two counter suits in two states and two countries.

The restaurant has gone out of business, but the $5 red tab has grown to more than $165,000.

On that night, Feb 29, 1980, O’Brien, who was then a University of Virginia graduate student in pharmacology, screamed that paying anything would violate his rights because he had eaten nothing and drunk nothing. At the Mousetrap’s request, he was taken by police to the Charlottesville jail. There, a magistrate refused to issue an arrest warrant. O’Brien was released.

O’Brien could have let the matter end there, his indignation justified by the magistrate, but he demanded a printed apology from the restaurant and threatened to sue…..  O’Brien’s lawsuits eventually were dismissed for various reasons, writing another possible ending to the incident. But the Mousetrap sued O’Brien after he had moved….[O’Brien failed to show up for the trial and]…without O’Brien in the courtroom, the jury awarded $60,000 in damages to the restaurant.

[The prosecutor] said O’Brien is to blame for his problems. “All he had to do all these years was come and tell the judge the story. He knew the suit was coming. Had he come to the judge, the judge would have reopened it. He didn’t tell anybody he was in town. He just decided he was going to be clever, I guess.”

O’Brien did not pay the judgment and [the prosecutor] pursued him in Massachusetts courts. O’Brien said that the matter still was not decided when he left the country for New Zealand in 1984.

For nearly seven years, O’Brien found peace from the Mousetrap suit.

But the search for O’Brien had not ended….  On a cool New Zealand evening last October, an officer of the court appeared on O’Brien’s doorstep. He carried papers saying O’Brien, who is now a 42-year-old lecturer in pharmacology at the Central Institute of Technology in Trentham, still owed the $60,000 judgment plus interest.

[As of the time of the writing of this article], the matter is under consideration in a New Zealand courtroom.[1]

Can you believe it?  A hot-headed college student set out to make a point about a five-dollar bar tab.  And, because he insisted on proving that he was right, he ended up fleeing to the other side of the world with a $165,000 debt hanging over his head.  Ironically, O’Brien later discovered that he had the tab in his pocket the entire time.  Just reading it, I wish that I could have been there to say, “Here, I’ll pay the $5!”

Of course, O’Brien wouldn’t have accepted because he was so committed to proving that he was right.

But, even as we shake our heads, most of us need to admit that there has been a time when we insisted on pursuing a matter because “it was the principle of the thing.”  Looking back on it, we would have to admit that it was foolish to pursue it.  It was never that important in the first place.

Stop for a moment.  Can you think of a time in your marriage or friendships that you blew something up when you should have let it go?

This brings us to an important truth; we do not need to formally resolve every conflict that takes place.  Some offenses need to be dropped.  While there are times that we go to another party and say, “You have offended me,” and we will talk about those occasions in the next chapter.  There are other times when we just need to get over the matter.  Proverbs 17:14 warns,

The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out.

~ Proverbs 17:14

In The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases,

The start of a quarrel is like the leak of a dam, so stop it before it bursts.[2]

Starting a quarrel is like playing with explosives at the base of Hoover Dam.  If you are not careful, you will end up blowing up the dam, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put the thing together again.  Starting a quarrel is like flinging a glass of water across a room.  Once you have done it, you can never reverse the process.

Other verses make a similar point.

• Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense (Proverbs 19:11).
• The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult (Proverbs 12:16).
• It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling (Proverbs 20:3).
• Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).

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[1] DeNeen L. Brown, “U-Va. Student’s $5 Bar Tab Now a $165,000 Hangover,” Washington Post, April 29 1991.

[2] Eugene Peterson, The Message: Proverbs (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1995), 58.