PEACEKEEPER? PEACEMAKER?

PRACTICE: Lacking peace? Why and where?

I have been visiting and revisiting these two words most of 2021. Wrote them in my blogging journal as I often do with thoughts that capture my attention. The struggle to bring words to paper has afforded me the opportunity to observe myself and others in these two distinct roles – peacemaker or peacekeeper. I am fairly certain that each of us have a predominant tendency toward one or the other. I am more certain that we are often called to operated outside of our preferred tendency.

When true peace exists in relationships be they personal, work related or on the playground, each party feels safe, encouraged, and free to grow. I contend if you or I are in situations where these freedoms are absent and we choose to continue down this road for the sake of peace, then just maybe we are practicing “keeping the peace.” On the other hand, if this situation exists and we address that which makes for an environment lacking safety, encouragement and loss of growth, peacemaker might be the appropriate label.

We are expert peacekeepers around our personal situations. It is far easier to make peace with a harmful behavior than to do the work to change it. Family life is a suitable place to observe this dynamic. Think of the times when you have known or read of a situation where physical or mental abuse was occurring, but no one came to the defense of the abused or confronted the abuser. Why not? To keep the peace… which is not peace at all because the abused was not safe and able to grow. Peace is not burying the head in the sand and doing nothing. Peacekeeping is externally easier and internally disastrous.

The path to peace is paved with rough stones, curves, detours, and roadblocks. Peacemaking is demanding work, requiring courage that we didn’t know we possessed but makes for a life of less inner turmoil. Peacemaking will probably not win you any immediate popularity awards. Peacemakers shake things up.

At times each of us will by necessity occupy either role. But which term describes your predominant tendency? Personally, I am not good at peace keeping. I don’t seek out a fight, but I will not run from one either. I am not a bully, and I can hold my tongue until the time is right to speak up. Everyone has the right to feel safe, to be encouraged and to have the freedom to grow, that belief requires me to be a peacemaker.

Proverbs 19:20

PONDER THIS THOUGHT--- Peace can only be kept when it is already present.