peacemaking

Raise your vibration, Not your tone of voice..You gain inspiration, For Peace is a choice.

Instead of thinking those who don't share your passions are not 'real Christians,' recognize the beauty of diversity within the body of Christ. Instead of being angry with others for not feeling your urgency about an issue, give them time to come around.

Peace may be hard to achieve, but is possible with small yet essential steps that are guided by courage and sufficient commitment.

Shine your soul with the same egoless humility as the rainbow and no matter where you go in this world or the next, love will find you, attend you, and bless you.

Peace isn't the absence of wars provoked by a series of delinquents of all sort, but a dynamic process of cooperation between states and people...

Love for one another will create peaceful co-existence.

Mankind must learn to coexist with each other to create a peaceful world.

It is the doom of the Christian church to be always distracted with controversy. John Quincy Adams

As religious leaders, we are called to be true "people of dialogue," to cooperate in building peace not as intermediaries but as authentic mediators. Intermediaries seek to give everyone a discount ultimately in order to gain something for themselves. However, the mediator is one who retains nothing for himself but rather spends himself generously until he is consumed, knowing that the only gain is peace. Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths to dialogue and not by constructing new walls! Let us dialogue and meet one another in order to establish a culture of dialogue in the world, a culture of encounter.

This world__ anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

Avoiding conflict isn__ peacemaking. Avoiding conflict means running away from the mess while peacemaking means running into the middle of it. Peacemaking means addressing those issues that caused conflict in the first place. Peacemaking can never be separated from doing justice. They go hand in hand. Peacemaking means having to stir the waters on the way to peace. Peacemaking means speaking the truth in love, but speaking the truth nonetheless.

Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen even in elementary school. Somebody wasn't fair to somebody and the hurt person just held it in. By the end of the year they had nearly disappeared. But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up _ even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake it loose, but no one liked them by now.Liyana wondered if the person who could let it out the same size it was to begin with, was luckiest.In Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.