Where Peace Begins
The full collection of all eight films that dive powerfully into how to navigate conflict in our lives.
The very first project for Waymakers was a series of eight films called Where Peace Begins that dives powerfully into how to navigate conflict in our lives.
Here are all eight films. We filmed them in a particular order to introduce the series, moving from intrapersonal to interpersonal to large socio-political conflict.
If you haven’t had a chance to watch them yet … I think they can be a powerful tool to help you navigate the most difficult conflicts in your life.
Hello to Conflict
The first video is Hello to Conflict. In the video, conflict mediator Chad Ford recounts his journey as a young missionary. During an encounter with a woman, he realized how fear had been hindering his ability to see people as Jesus did.
Questions for Personal Reflection
As you watch this video, we invite you to set aside your phone, find a quiet space, and ponder the following questions that Chad’s video prompted. You might journal or find someone to share your thoughts with. You can also respond in a comment below.
Where do you find yourself today? Where do you feel like you are in exile right now—whether emotionally, spiritually, or in your relationships?
Who else is involved in your story of your exile? What has their story been, their experience? Where do you think they find themselves, today?
What would peace feel like, in your circumstances? What do you picture, when you imagine the possibility of return, restoration, or reconciliation?
Shalom means both "peace" and "hello." What might change in your life if you saw peace not as an end goal, but as an invitation to show up and engage more fully with the present moment?
Love Casts Out Fear
Our second video, Love Casts out Fear with Desmond Lomax dropped on Tuesday. In this video Desmond, a terrific therapist, teacher and dad, shares a tragic story from his family that taught him that he shouldn’t wait until circumstances improve, injustices resolve, and proof arrives that he is “good enough” before loving others unconditionally.
Questions for Personal Reflection
As you watch this video, we invite you to set aside your phone, find a quiet space, and ponder the following questions that Desmond’s video prompted. You might journal or find someone to share your thoughts with. You can also respond in a comment below.
Desmond observes that we often fear we are inadequate or too flawed to let ourselves love others fully. Do you see this in yourself? Are there weaknesses or inadequacies that you assume make you incapable of love?
We often think “unconditional love” applies to how we treat other people; it also applies to how we think about ourselves. How does your heart respond as you imagine that you, right now, are worthy of unconditional love? How do the challenges in your life look differently?
Think of a current conflict in your life that involves another person. Do you have an expectation for the other person to change? What would happen if you dropped this expectation?
Where in your life are you “waiting” for a situation to change before you will allow yourself to love? What if you just decided to love, right now?
Truth in Conflict
In our third video, “Truth in Conflict”—we hear from Jennifer Finlayson-Fife about how she and her sister healed their relationship after years of emotional distance. The distance was sustained for years by partial truths they were hanging on to; both of them could see ways the other person was in the wrong, or was being unfair. While they weren’t technically incorrect, it is only when they moved towards acknowledging the other person’s perspective—the truth they had been avoiding—that the possibility for genuine trust and closeness returned.
Putting ideas into action
After watching Jennifer’s video, think of a conflict you are having in your life. Use the following exercise to consider how truth can bring back closeness and understanding.
Think through your explanation of the conflict, and the other person’s explanation of the conflict. Where do your stories align, and where do they diverge? How do you both characterize the other?
Consider the exercise that Jennifer went through in the video: If points B, C, D, and E of the other person’s explanation feel false, but A feels correct, focus on A instead of B, C, D, or E. Where is the other person correct, and inviting you to see truth?
Think of how you can communicate to the other person that you acknowledge A without justification. Don’t provide excuses or a long explanation that lessens our responsibility. Own it. Say, “I can see how my [words, actions, etc.] have caused you pain. I am so sorry.”
Offer to change. Offer to fix the mistake that you make. Give them a reason to trust that what has happened in the past won’t happen again.
If after doing all of this, the person you are in conflict with refuses to acknowledge their mistakes, offer grace instead of condemnation.
A Peaceful Heart
When going through her divorce, Dr. LaShawn Williams once leaned her head against the wall and imagined she was leaning her head on the shoulder of Jesus. She prayed for a heart at peace.
Conflict often makes us feel helpless, unsure of ourselves and unsure of the future. In our fourth video, “A Peaceful Heart,” LaShawn shares about opening her heart when her life situation felt beyond her control. She found deep wisdom in The Peacegiver by James Ferrell, who used the language “ungird your heart.” Ungirding usually refers to relinquishing our weapons. When we ungird our hearts, LaShawn explains, we find that we don’t need the violence that we thought we needed.
Putting ideas into action
After watching LaShawn’s video, think of a conflict you are having in your life. Use the following exercise to consider how you can obtain a heart at peace.
Go to the mountaintop. Our view of others tends to get mired in the mud of anger and justification when we are wrestling with conflict. Find a place, metaphorically, that lets you rise above all of that. It could be a piece of music, a sunrise or sunset, exercise, or a holy place that elevates your thinking and heightens your senses.
Ask yourself how a loving God, loving parents, or a loving friend might see the person you are in conflict with. Can you, for just a moment, see the person you are in conflict through that new lens?
Ask yourself, how can the faith I have in myself or in God be extended to them? How can my faith connect to their faith in a way that allows us to collaboratively solve our problems together?
Take the first step. Be proactive. Exercise faith in the possibility of reconciliation by reaching out to them in faith and love, not knowing what will come next.
Loving Our Enemies
As a young woman, Pastor White would sit on her bed with clenched fists, repeating, “I will forgive. I will forgive.” The choice to forgive, as Jamie shares in this video, “Loving your Enemies” is a choice to re-enter life after being transformed by tragedy.
In our fifth Where Peace Begins video, Pastor White tells her story and it is one of the most powerful sermons I’ve heard on the power of loving our enemies. Note: this video contains discussion of sexual assault. Though the story shared is one of resilience and transformation, viewer discretion is advised.
Putting ideas into action
After watching Jamie’s video, think of a tragedy or disappointment that has permanently changed your life. The following questions, we hope, will help you glimpse how this tragedy can
How has this tragedy transformed you? Bring to mind all the transformations, both internally and in your external circumstances, whether good or bad. How would your life be different, absent this tragedy?
Can you identify gifts that have come through this transformation? Are there any areas where God has given you beauty for ashes?
Bring to mind the wounds and the scars that the tragedy left behind. What would it mean to make these scars into your greatest treasures? When you think about this, what do you feel called to do?
Was there anyone else involved in this situation? Take a moment to think about them. They too have experienced pain, disappointment. They too carry scars. What does it do for you when you see their pain? What do you feel called to do?
Start Close In
Our sixth Where Peace Begins video, Start Close In, with Thomas McConkie includes this powerful poem from David Whyte.
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
- David Whyte
Thomas teaches that if we pay intimate attention to our hearts, we can recognize where we feel that pinch of disturbance—that place that we want to avoid. If we have the courage and humility to show up there with love, new life opens up.
“My belief is that conflict is grace in disguise. When we unmask it and realize what an opportunity it is to follow it into a new life, we give thanks that God has blessed us with this conflict.”
Putting ideas into action
After watching Thomas’s video, think of a conflict you are having in your life. Use the following exercise to consider how you can “start close in.”
Ask yourself, what aspects of this conflict pinch or “disturb” you? What is that disturbance asking you to see? Where does it call you should start?
Thomas identifies the values of justice, mercy, and humility as guides that helped him navigate his first step -- the one he didn’t want to take. Those are all powerful values, but they may not be yours. What are the core values that, when you are being your best self, guide you in your relationships with others? Brené Brown lists a number of key values that may help you get the moral imagination firing here: https://brenebrown.com/resources/dare-to-lead-list-of-values/
After you’ve identified those values, ask yourself the questions …
What is one behavior that supports this value?
What is one behavior that contradicts this value?
Now comes the action part. Thomas decided to have weekly Sunday dinners with his family. While he found the experience “disturbing” after hundreds of dinners, something started changing within him. Choose one behavior that you can apply to the person you are in conflict with and take the first step. Not the second or the third step – the first step, the step you don’t want to take.
The Breath of God
In our seventh Where Peace Begins film, The Breath of God, Imam Rashied Omar reflects on his experience as a young activist and spiritual leader, showing how interfaith solidarity and deep faith can transform even the most unjust of societies.
“Justice, from a religious perspective, is affirming the full dignity of the other. To know that every human being has within him or herself the breath of God. If I offend you, I am offending the breath of God.”
It’s a moving account that show’s how a lifelong commitment to faith prepared him for spiritual leadership during turbulent political times.
Putting ideas into action
Rashied’s video is about the link between our spiritual lives and the moral imagination that we can take with us into society. In his book The Moral Imagination, John Paul Lederach in offers four powerful ways to do this.
See yourself in a relational web: “Imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies.” Begin to see how all of us are deeply connected in relationship. There is no “me” without “we.”
Be curious about others’ joys and grievances: “Sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity.” Remain curious about others. Seek understanding. Understand that human beings are different and complex, but that there are also key things that connect us together.
Break the script: “Belief in and pursuit of the creative act.” Break out of old patterns of interaction. Find new and creative ways of connecting. Use food, holidays, sports, music, art, literature -- all of the tools that inspire human creativity to find deeper and more meaningful ways to connect.
Take risks: Acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into conflict. When we are stuck in conflict we often wait for the other person to take the first step. It feels safer, less vulnerable that way. Being the first person to open up our arms and take the risk of embrace creates space for the other person to know you want to reconcile and it’s safe.
From Exile to Return
In our eighth and final video of Where Peace Begins, From Exile to Return,Patrick Mason shares what he's learned about creativity and peace from survivors of the Rwanda genocide. It’s a powerful conclusion to our series on peacemaking.
Finally …
Having now watched all eight videos in this series, consider the following:
In thinking about conflict in your life, think about the conditions that you wish were different—maybe another person’s attitude or behavior, or for a specific life stage to end. Think of all the things you are waiting to change before you show up willing to build and restore love. Consider writing these down.
Now, think about what it would mean to stop waiting for the conditions to be right and begin creating the conditions of peace today. As you look at the list of things you wish would change, do you think they really need to? Where is your own agency involved? What can you create, despite all you can’t change?
If you imagine this conflict like being stuck on a treadmill—the same dynamic happening over and over again—what would it look like to hop off the treadmill and introduce a new dynamic? How can you show up in a way that would be creative, innovative, surprising, fresh, and transformative?
These videos have been an exercise in expanding moral imagination. As you’ve watched and listened to these eight stories, has your own imagination for how to work through conflict been expanded? Have any thoughts, intuition, or flashes of inspiration come to you? Write these down in a place where you can come back to it regularly. Trust your own moral imagination.
Please let us know what you think of the video series and drop some comments below!
Where Peace Begins was produced by Chad Ford and Patrick Mason and filmmaker Tay Steele with financial support from Faith Matters, the One America Movement.