I was ten years old when I realized my life’s purpose: I would marry David Bowie, the king of Goblin City, have fantastic afternoons playing in his (well, I guess, our) labyrinth with Falcore, my adopted luck dragon. I would be known in all the land as the resident peacemaker. I’d settle disputes between magical creatures and use my wit to calm tensions. I imagined myself wearing white—all the time—with a serene smile on my face. Jerad, the Goblin King, and I would butt heads over running the kingdom. He, of course, would be crafty and sometimes selfish, but as his peacemaking queen, my gentleness and innocence would always prevail. He’d shake his head, utterly charmed and I’d bask in the quiet glow of victory. A victory, I would afterward remind myself, that was mine without bloodshed or strife.
I blame Jim Henson for the first two of my preteen goals, and Jesus for the latter. My children’s pastor read Matthew 5:9 to us one Sunday and to my ten-year-old mind, peacemaking was the ultimate goal for anyone who wanted to call God her “Abba,” and I did. So, I merged my two loves—my fantasy world and my spirituality—together.
Twenty-five years later I’m glad we can’t marry our favorite movie characters, I still (kinda, sorta) want a luck dragon, and I’m wholly convinced that my calling is to practice peacemaking every single day. I would dare to say that every person who considers themselves a disciple of Jesus Christ should practice peacemaking and live a life devoted to shalom. I know the idea of being a peacemaker is almost as fantastic as living in a fairytale kingdom of goblins and Hoggles, talking worms, and luck dragons, but Jesus himself tells us that peacemaking is woven into the very DNA of God’s family.
So what do we do with that? Do we only listen if we have the temperament toward peacemaking? When peacemaking seems like a good idea and not a vital practice for the Christian, where do we begin?
I once heard the peace of God described as the place where his rest meets our restlessness. In more ancient terms, St. Augustine gave us these words: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
It was late 2005 when disaster struck my family and my home. Never before had I needed to examine what I believed peace meant when everything in my life seemed turn upside and shaken for loose change. We found ourselves living in public housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after we evacuated Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans—so there was relational and financial unrest. My children were all four and under (I had two under two)—so there was physical unrest. My husband was in seminary and I felt alone in a cold, snowy city—more relational unrest.
During this time, I’d often mediate on the instance of Jesus calming the storm from the ledge of a fishing boat with his disciples cowering behind him. For forty days, the Lenten season after Katrina struck, I asked Jesus, “What did you mean when you said, blessed are the peacemakers?” and, “What do you dream for me when I ask for peace?” and, “Where does shalom play into all of this?” Christ’s response to me was a very clear answer for what peace is not, two reasons to practice peace daily, and three places to practice shalom.
For most of my Christian life, I believed peace was the absence of conflict; to be a peacemaker meant you were uniquely skilled in avoiding, diverting, or deflecting conflict. I took mandates like “a gentle and quite spirit” to mean that peacemaking and pacifism looks more like passivity than prophecy. I often used the story of Jesus calming the seas as a metaphor for his ability to take the “storms” of our lives and tame them.
But the fact of the matter is, this perspective on shalom is all naivete and wishful thinking. Peacemaking and embracing the peace of Christ rely on the position of your heart more than your circumstances. Peacemaking looks conflict dead-on because some of the storms in our lives can never be tamed.
Infertility. Racism. Genocide. War. Food deserts. Peacemaking is not ignoring or avoiding the conflicts in our world but allowing God to use us as influences in the midst of conflict.
One of my favorite prayers during my forty days of finding peace comes from St. Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon:
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair; hope;
Where there is darkness; light;
Where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
For me, this prayer solidified what shalom should look for the Christian who wants to live a life of peace. It’s storm-facing and other-centered.
Storm-facing like Christ facing Satan in the desert; every temptation greater than the last, every opportunity to move away from suffering offered, and yet he resisted because he knew true peace wouldn’t come from avoiding the pain but embracing it for the joy on the other side.
Storm-facing like Jesus challenging the men who accused the woman caught in the act of adultery to examine the brokenness in their own lives, reminding everyone within earshot of their deep need for a merciful savior.
Storm-facing like when Jesus restored the demonic to his community by healing him to his revealing that God’s heart beats for healing and family.
Storm-facing like when Jesus cleared the temple of merchants selling sacrificial animals to worshipers, disrupting systemic corruption and prejudice and restoring the worship experience to what it should be about, us connecting to God, not greedy religious leaders profiting off the piety of the poor.
Storm-facing like Jesus, standing before Pontius Pilate, the embodiment of a violent empire bloody, beaten, and betrayed and proclaiming that yes, in fact he is king, and his kingdom is not of this world.
In every instance, Jesus practiced shalom. He was the Peacemaker because he faced a source of conflict in the world, an evidence of the stain of sin in our universe, and worked to restore it. Jesus, the author of my practice of peacemaking showed me in those forty days of peace that peacemaking required a ton of courage, grit, and a resolve to lean into the discomfort of the storms.
Peacemaking does seem like something quite out of our reach. I’m a girl with a hot temper and a quick tongue, a peacemaker who struggles to let her gentleness be evident to all. During those forty days, I realized that something that shaped my desire to live at peace with everyone I come in contact with: I need to practice peace daily.
There are two reasons for this necessary “dailyness.” First, peacemaking is the heart of the gospel—while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. In his greatest act of peacemaking, Jesus restored shalom between God and us. We can approach God as Abba Father again because Jesus modeled self-sacrificial love on the cross and mortified the powers of sin and death. If peace is deeper than surface comfort, if it’s truly shalom (which in Hebrew means wholeness, harmony, and restoration), then as a follower of Jesus, living a life that reflects that same sacrificial love in the face of conflict is essential to my spiritual health.
Second, practicing peacemaking daily reminds us of our immeasurable worth to God and it gives us eyes to see the worth in others. When I reflect on God’s tenacious love for me that seeks to make me whole in my own areas of brokenness, a love for others wells up and spills out of me. It almost like that visceral reality of my belovedness is almost too much to bear alone; I must find someone else and remind them in whatever way I can of their own belovedness, too. I think this is what Paul meant when he said, “they will know us by our love.” I think this is what made the disciples so effective: for three years they received such concentrated, daily doses of their belovedness from Jesus that when he ascended, they were compelled to tell, show, do, and restore out of the overflow of that love. This is our unique calling as peacemakers.
But I’m just a stay-at-home mom of three. How can I practice radical peacemaking when all I have is a laptop and a crock pot? For me, I decided there are three areas I want to focus my shalom practices. The Hebrew roots of the word, shalom give us a multidirectional concept of relational wholeness between us and the earth, one another, and God.
Working with this definition of shalom created a structure to this very all-encompassing concept: Every day I should seek to do something that works toward my spiritual wholeness, my relational wholeness, and my environmental wholeness.
Practicing spiritual wholeness could look like anything that positions us to connect with God. I connect with God best on walks and good books. For some connection comes through devotionals or worship albums, and for still others it’s lectionaries and liturgies. To be a peacemaker for your own soul means to connect your soul to the Jesus and let him remind your worthiness, your unique gifts, and your passions.
Practicing relational wholeness with those around us gives us easily identifiable people to love—those in your family, workplace, church, neighborhood—but walking out that love is incredibly hard to accomplish. I tried to start small by remembering the names of the cashiers, phone representatives, maintenance workers—basically anyone whose job it is to make my life easier. When I’m out and about, I make it a point to say their names and thank them for their help. It humanizes them, and it humanizes me. It turns a simple transaction of dollars and cents into one of belovedness and peace.
With those a little closer to me (especially when they frustrate me), I practice offering grace through the acknowledging of backstories. You know those movies that are all the rage now, the prequel where you meet the hero before he’s the hero and often see the villain as a child? Usually in those movies, some trauma happens and then you as the viewer have more context and, sometimes grace for the villain. In my day-to-day life, I try to practice “the grace of the prequel” by imagining stories for the erratic drivers around me (that they are in a hurry because of an emergency or in danger of losing their jobs, or simply are unfamiliar with their surroundings). Practicing prequels instantly calms me down behind the wheel. This also works for my kids, my husband, my church family, just about anyone with whom I’m tempted to be in conflict. Instead, I take a deep breath and give them a backstory. Slowly, the more I off er them grace this way, the less tempted I am to escalate the drama.
A few years ago, I yelled at my black son that “white people were looking for reasons to shoot black boys” when he took a pair of sunglasses from the GAP. I had just read about Trayvon Martin and I couldn’t get out of my mind the image a young boy in a hoodie dying in the street because of a scared white man. As a black mom in America right now I’m terrified, so when I talk about race sometimes I speak out of that fear. While it may be easy for me to make prequels for the people in my life who annoy me, it’s incredibly difficult to make prequels for the people who I view as the “other” or the “oppressor,” or as Jesus put it, “the enemy.” What does relational wholeness look like with the person who I want to vilify more than anything? It looks like speaking the truth when I’m tempted to speak lies. It looks like resisting fear so that I can access shalom.
I find myself saying, “That white policeman who forced that child in a bikini down to the ground is made in the image of God. He is a person. What he has done is horrific, but he is not his actions.” I find myself saying, “To Jesus, he was worth dying for—just like me.” I find myself saying, “If Jesus can forgive him, so can I.” I call this speaking shalom instead of fear, and, eventually, the anger is replaced by sadness. The defensiveness is replaced with vulnerability. The bitterness is replaced by forgiveness, and I’m once again at peace. The scales, as they say, fall from my eyes and I see the white person who once represented all the things I hate about racism in our country as a human being, wholly beloved, and in need of my grace. Then the words to their prequel come rushing in: maybe they’ve never thought about race before, so they act from that place of privilege. Maybe they’re afraid of sounding dumb so they say nothing at all. Maybe they’re willing, but their context doesn’t allow them to explore racial justice. Maybe . . . maybe . . . maybe . . . is the gateway to relational wholeness.
Practicing environmental wholeness reminds us that we are responsible for the world we live in. We are called to be good stewards of the earth and our communities. So, I tried to learn about current affairs; I paid attention to emails from the school about policy changes, classroom needs, and local governments. I believe God loves the city I live in, so I go to church three blocks from skid row and worship weekly with the homeless, poor, and forgotten. I keep my heart open when I hear of suffering in a developing country and ask God how I can help. And yes, I recycle, limit my water use, and carpool when I can. These acts of peacemaking honor God as good, creative Provider and accept our calling to be ambassadors of his abundance.
There are days I wish being a peacemaker were as simple as childhood imaginary games. I wish it were as simple as standing up and saying, “Peace be still.” But then again, I’m glad it isn’t. If it were, I wouldn’t need to rely on Jesus and his Holy Spirit to remind me that his peace is not just for me, but for all those in my context.
Osheta Moore is an Anabaptist-y blogger and podcaster in Los Angeles. She’s passionate about racial reconciliation, peacemaking, and community development in the urban core. At the top of her bucket list is dance in a flash mob—all the better if it’s to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or Pharrell’s “Happy.”