Peace Treatments

I have just finished reading one of the most powerfully impacting books I have ever read.  I cried, I learned, I sat amazed and in wonder.  Everything, absolutely everything, that God is about when it comes to righting wrong flies in the face of how we humans normally and naturally (on account of our fallen natures) do it.  Humans hate, and want revenge, God loves,  and wants forgiveness and reconciliation.  It astounds me, He astounds me.  His grace is indeed amazing. The book is called As We Forgive, Stories of Reconcilation from Rwanda by Catherine Claire Larson (Zondervan, 2009).  I highly recommend it.  This is not just a book for restorative justice advocates and practioners like me;  it is a book for anyone who has been harmed or who has harmed another (and any harm will do, for all conflict that does not transform us so that we do the loving thing inevitably has and will cause harm) There was so much to take away from this book and that is saying alot, considering all the

How many times over the years have I heard Matthew 18:19 - 20 referenced by people who are praying for a specific thing?  For example, when praying with others for healing, I myself  have voiced the "promise", to remind God that "where two are agreed on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in Heaven".  Now though, as I study reconciliation, biblical peacemaking and conflict transformation more and more, I am fast becoming convinced that this promise, made by Jesus, is contextual to the passages that precede it, and the promise holds true for the miraculous that occurs when two or more people agree to make things right between them. Matthew 18: 15 - 18 concerns strained relationships that result from sin and the conflict that arises from unacknowledged and or unrepented sin and lays out one of the most important, biblical teachings on how we are to respond when this happens.   First, Jesus teaches,  "If a brother sins against yo