Blessed are the peacemakers

Cards Against Humanity is a hilarious game.

This is not me recommending it. Not by a long shot. If you want to play and play it well, you pretty much have to check your soul at the door.

It’s basically a wildly inappropriate version of Apples to Apples. You make sentences out of different bizarre phrases. And frankly, some of them are just unspeakable. Which of course makes it all the more funny and shocking when they are actually spoken.

Very few words offend me and there are very few I consider off limits. One of my clients who was a nurse informed me that cussing feels good because dopamine is released into your brain every time you do it. That explains a lot.

But I do have a couple of things that I absolutely do not say. One is ‘G.D.’ and the other is ‘J.C.’ Those two just make me physically cringe.

So you can imagine the internal struggle I faced when one of my cards had the phrase, ‘G.D. (except spelled out) peace and quiet.’

For some reason, that card just tickled me to no end and every time I got it or somebody else got it, I would just laugh until I cried. Just sounded like something a grumpy old man would say right after ordering some kids off his lawn.

It’s become sort of a joke between Brad and me. When I start to get ruffled by the noise and chaos of a house of five, Brad will chuckle and say, “Do you just want some G.D. peace and quiet?”

And the answer is always a resounding YES.

I am a peace junkie. For most of my life, my goal was peace at any cost. Sell your soul, bottle your feelings, smooth it over. What can I say? I’m a middle child. It’s just in there.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to figure out how to make peace with, um, NOT PEACE. At least regarding circumstances. The illusion of control never lasts long.

JOY was my word, the theme of my song, through the month of December. But beginning in January, I’ve been a living experiment of PEACE. I’m studying what the Bible says about it. I’m cross-referencing it in commentaries. I’m chasing it. God and I wrestle and wrestle through what He means when He says it. When He COMMANDS it.

Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus said, for they will be called children of God.

What exactly does it mean to be a peacemaker?

For years, I was a peaceKEEPER. That’s different. That is not what Jesus is asking for. Not walking around on eggshells trying to maintain a fragile ceasefire. I’ve also been a peaceFAKER more than I care to admit, pretending all is well just to avoid what could be a necessary, healthy and maybe even healing confrontation.

I am now on the journey to determine what God means for me when He asks me to be a peacemaker.

Honestly, the first thing I think of when I think of ‘peacemaker’ is Wyatt Earp’s gun in the movie Tombstone. He was a peace OFFICER (that sounds cool) in Dodge City for years and the story is that when he retired, the grateful citizens of the town gave him this gun with PEACEMAKER inscribed on it.

To me, the implication there is that he was a peacemaker (or the gun was the peacemaker) by just threatening to eliminate anyone or anything disturbing the peace.

So this image of the gun from the movie is in my head when the line from Andrew Peterson’s song High Noon meets it, almost like a caption: “His gun is the grace of the God of the Sky.”

The weapon… of peace… is ‘weapon of peace’ an oxymoron? The weapon of peace is grace. Grace overruns chaos/destruction with peace…

Then I remember one of my favorite lines from a fairly recent sermon of Brad’s: “God’s grace is on a hair trigger.” More gun imagery. Interesting.

I decide to go with it and end up in Ephesians 6 where Paul teaches the new believers to ‘put on the full armor of God.’ The helmet was salvation, the breastplate was righteousness. I knew peace was part of the outfit in there somewhere. I found it. It was in the shoes.

…and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. (v.15)

I dug deeper and found a quote from Daniel Whitby, a somewhat controversial theologian (my favorite kind) from the 1700s.

That you may be ready for combat, be shod with the gospel of peace, endeavor after that peaceable and quiet mind which the gospel calls for. Be not easily provoked, nor prone to quarrel: but show gentleness and long-suffering to all men, and this will preserve you from temptations and persecutions as did those brass shoes the soldiers from those galltraps.

Not easily tripped up by traps, not easily provoked. Protected from pointless setups. Not stepping on landmines of dissension that could set off a chain reaction.

More references to war, fighting, combat. Seemed completely antithetical to the concept of peace.

Finally, it snapped into place: Peace doesn’t come by just walking around speaking in low tones trying not to melt any fragile snowflakes.

True peace must be fought for. And true peace is hard won.

I often refer to my role in our family as a bomb defuser. I’m the one who walks into the room containing at least one ticking explosive donning a flak jacket ready to examine the device and clip the right wire to disarm the bomb. And frankly, I’m damn good at it.

I think another word for that might be ‘peacemaker.’

Since my blog last week, I have exchanged olive branches in one area of ongoing strife in my life. To end our meeting as friends was not the goal. The goal was understanding. Actually, the goal was PEACE. As we left, the person referred to me as a ‘peace broker.’ I’ll take that.

You don’t make peace by faking it. You don’t make peace by avoiding conflict at all costs. Peacemakers march into a war zone armed with grace and unleash the gospel on anyone in their path. Allies, enemies, innocent bystanders, it doesn’t matter. The shrapnel of grace will lodge itself into your flesh until you succumb to the mighty gospel of Jesus Christ.

I have walked into many a war zone over the past decade. More often than not, I barely make it out alive and spend months licking my wounds and rethinking this whole assignment.

But every once in a while, when I’m smart enough to let God call the shots, it works. And when the dust settles, the only smoking gun is the grace of the God of the Sky.

I will never be worthy of such a holy weapon. But my Jesus doesn’t care. He continues to reload again and again and again.

His love, His mercy, and His grace know no bounds. And I will make peace ‘as far as it depends on me’ (Romans 12:18).

Or die trying.