The wide space in the alleyway in front of our door is a favorite place for kids to hang out and especially for playing marbles on Sunday afternoons.  Those games can get pretty loud through our thin walls, and occasionally we hear the escalating roar or the cry that brings us out into the dirt path to break up a fight.  So far it’s only been little boys that we’ve had to physically pry away from each other, although late one night we also found ourselves on the scene of a more serious fight between two grown men, who were startled by our sudden appearance but were really interrupted by policemen arriving on the scene a moment later.  There was the day a cop chased a young man from our community down our alleyway and dragged him back to the road, kicking him and hitting him over the head until a crowd of neighbors gathered as witnesses and the officer decided to leave.  Then there are the fights that we only hear about and are powerless to intervene in: the domestic violence that reveals itself as an unexplained black eye, as an offhand comment from a child, as a sobering story in a moment alone with a friend, or as an insensitive joke in a public setting as people do what they can to cope with a situation that they see no way out of.

          We see the cycle in motion as children learn violence from a young age.  They see it within their family. They experience it from both adults and peers.  For them it becomes normal, and whether they find themselves in the role of aggressor or victim, they can see its effectiveness.  But in its frequency and escalation, we can see its futility.

          It’s not just within our slum that we see the downward spiral of violence play out on a daily basis. Drone wars, guerilla wars, and gang wars all operate along the same lines of dehumanizing enemies and taking eye for eye and tooth for tooth. If anything, our community is simply a representative sample where violence plays out on the small scale of individual and family interactions.

          Living within this microcosm of a world shot through with violence, we sense with new wonder the miracle that the Prince of Peace Himself has entered our world to reconcile all things to Himself and establish peace on the earth (Isaiah 9:6, Col. 1:20).  What a radical transformation!  This peacemaking process is nothing short of the birth of a new world.  As we wait for God to come, we struggle to keep hold of the impossible hope that our Prince of Peace has declared with His life and his death– that another world is possible.  

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For more on Jesus’ approach to active non-violent love and the Biblical basis of Christian peacemaking, check out our friend’s thoughtful blog at www.enemylove.com