Peace Treatments

Flattery is telling someone what you think they want to hear in order to manipulate them to your way. Compliment is telling someone something positive about them and may or may not have self serving motives behind it.  Perhaps you genuinely do think they have the best laugh or nicest smile and you simply want them to know that, no sticky motives about it. Neither of these is encouragement. Encouragement is defined as the act of giving someone support, confidence or hope.  There is a strengthening component to encouragement.  Someone is downcast, discouraged and about to give up and you come along with support, which strengthens their confidence and helps instill some hope in them.   Renewed confidence and hope equate to courage, so in a sense, encouraging someone is giving them courage. I used to think that this sort of encouragement had to be done with words, words that spoke truth and life and went to the core of someone's soul, shining light into darkness, compelling t

It's been over 2 years since I last posted a blog  on here. In that time I've moved to a small interior town in the province where I live.  My new town is nestled at the end of an arm on a large lake.  The lake fronts the town while a mountain has it's back.  It's lovely here, and quite the change of pace from the big city. In that time I completed a post graduate diploma in Christian studies from a theological seminary only to be bitten by the bug so that now said diploma forms the first half of another MA.  It's occurred to me that sustainable and transformative peace building entails more than understanding the theories and being competent at the practices of conflict management; on the contrary sustainable peace building need involve the heart, spirit, soul of a person.  Hence, the integration of spiritual formation and spiritual direction into my peace building practice. In that time I stopped colouring my hair and am now a white haired grandmother who