Peace Treatments

Woke up early this am and went downstairs to pray.  As often happens, I fell asleep mid sentence and had several dreams.  As very occasionally happens, I woke up with a bazillion thoughts racing around my brain, some of which took the leap from the head to the heart while I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes. I'm beginning to think this is how Holy Spirit talks to me.  During my waking hours my mind is so pre-occupied I only hear Him in the fog between sleep and wakefulness. Anyway, I gotta get these down....the thoughts that took the leap... Is it possible to forgive without Holy Spirit? Do we forgive first so that we can then love or do we love first so that we can forgive? And again,  can we do either without Holy Spirit grace and power? Does the motive behind our forgiveness matter much to God?  If I forgive because my church upbringing has inculturated a sense of duty to forgive,  what then is my forgiveness borne out of - se...

I admit, I've been caught up in the possibility of God working a miracle in Rwanda and wonder if that is what has compelled me to want to go there.  When I hear of things like reconciliation villages between Hutus and Tutsi's, and restorative justice Jesus style, I think the world is going to see something like they've never seen before ... love and reconciliation at work on an impossible scale and I get excited...what with me being a sucker for reconciliation and all. But apparently it's not all that true.  There is some forgiveness there, sure, and even some authentic reconciliation but mostly (apparently) the reconciliation that is occurring in Rwanda is "imposed"..expectations pressed upon a Christian people in a self declared Christian nation so that peace and order are maintained.  It brings to mind words like "accommodating" and "compromise"... or even worse, images of a numbed out, frozen smile, that hides behind the kind of che...