Caring Enough To Confront By David AugsburgerSample

Day Six

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Scripture: Hebrews 12:14

There is a rule about peacemaking that is as predictable as gravity: You can either make peace or get the credit for it. You cannot do both. 

Peacemakers learn that in order for peace to be restored between alienated people, both parties must own the process, take their own steps forward, consider the risks involved, and accept the consequences for the agreed upon outcome. By the time they have done all this, the peace achieved belongs solely and fully to the participants, not to the peacemakers who assisted. In fact, the annoyances and leftover grievances often get laid at the mediator’s door.

If your need to be thanked is great, peacemaking is likely not a role you should seek. Peacemaking is bridge-building and the purpose of a bridge is to be walked on. It exists for others to cross over and return. 

Making peace is often a lengthy, tortuous, repetitious, and tedious process requiring great patience and endurance. Peacemakers are persons who have developed a long-range vision and are able to see long-term goals. They are people of stubborn patience with a long view of human existence. 

Immediate solutions have their place. They can reduce explosive tensions so that longer-range settlements can be negotiated. Strategic solutions have their use. They can create a working agreement among parties that holds together until a more stable 

covenant can be made.

But peacemakers who have caught a vision of a lasting peace commit themselves not only to short-term gains but also to long-term goals. Peacemakers who take the long view recognize that the values that shape their decisions must be lasting values—values that transcend not only one’s own culture, race, and nation, but also one’s own lifetime, century, millennium. 

Nothing that is truly worth doing is ever completed in one generation. Nothing that is truly worth attempting can be accomplished by one person, without the help, support, guidance, and wisdom of the community. Nothing that will be lasting, that will endure, makes complete sense in any immediate situation, in any given moment in history. 

So peacemakers prefer the long view and seek to set their consciences by those values that have depth in the history of humankind, that have breadth in their universal applicability, that have height in their accountability before God and all that is known through God’s saving activity among His people. 

Are you a peacemaker? Why or why not?