Sometimes Keeping the Peace Is the Least Peaceful Thing You Can Do

There is a kind of peace that isn’t peace at all.

Imagine a small community where everyone is determined to be nice.

Nobody raises difficult subjects.

Nobody challenges the person who dominates meetings.

Nobody mentions the resentment that has been growing quietly for months.

Everyone smiles.

Everyone goes home irritated.

This happens in families, workplaces, friendships and churches. We sometimes confuse the absence of arguments with the presence of peace.

But silence can be remarkably noisy.

Consider Mark, who has a problem with a close friend. Every time he tries to raise it, he imagines the conversation going badly. So he says nothing.

Weeks pass.

The friend has no idea anything is wrong.

Mark becomes increasingly resentful.

Eventually, he explodes over something relatively minor.

The argument wasn’t created by the conversation.

It was created by all the conversations that never happened.

This doesn’t mean confrontation is automatically virtuous. Some people use “honesty” as an excuse for cruelty. There is a world of difference between saying what is true and saying whatever you feel.

The harder skill is honest speech combined with care.

Can I tell you what is troubling me without trying to humiliate you?

Can I listen to your response without preparing my counterattack?

Can I admit that my interpretation might be incomplete?

Can we remain in the room when the conversation becomes uncomfortable?

Diane Cooper’s chapter on conflict makes an interesting case: avoiding difficulty in the name of unity can create distance, resentment and brittle relationships. Honest conversation, approached with humility, can actually test and strengthen whether a relationship is real. fileciteturn1file4L89-L90

That idea becomes even more important in faith communities, where people can feel pressure to appear agreeable because disagreement seems spiritually suspicious.

But genuine community isn’t a room where everyone thinks the same thing.

It’s a place where people can disagree without making disagreement a threat to belonging.

Perhaps peace isn’t the absence of tension.

Perhaps peace is knowing that truth can be spoken without love disappearing.

Faith for the Middle of Life by Diane Cooper:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN2954Y6

Which is more damaging to a relationship in the long run: one difficult conversation, or years of things that nobody is willing to say?

#Conflict, #Communication, #Faith, #Christianity, #Relationships, #HonestConversations, #Boundaries, #Spirituality, #ChristianLiving, #DianeCooper