Peacemakers

We thought we were peacemakers, and we were wrong. This post is about what we found underneath that — the warring heart that hid under our peacekeeping, and what becoming an actual peacemaker has begun to look like for us.

Val: I grew up on a dairy farm where there were hours of chores to do daily. When my mother asked me to do a chore, I usually did it without complaint — at least out loud — while some of my brothers and sisters complained out loud and made their misery well known. Of course, this resulted in me receiving a disproportionate allotment of chores because my mom didn’t want to hear the complaining. But I also received something else. My mother called me the peacemaker of the family. When my siblings fought, I was the one who calmed the tempers.

That name carried for decades. I felt honored that my mother had given it to me, and I held onto it. I carried it into the rest of my life.

Bruce: I was given the same kind of name in my own family, and I carried it with the same quiet pride into my adult life and my first marriage.

Both of us, separately and across two different first marriages, walked through the world thinking peacemaker was a true description of who we were. We both looked at it as a great strength.

We have both come to believe we were wrong.

What we were doing was something else, in different shapes.

Val: For me, peacemaking looked like absorbing the conflict before it could happen. I sometimes took too much responsibility for other people’s problems. And I worked hard to managed the emotional weather of the home. But then I ended up carried the bad feelings inside my own body so they would not have to be in the room.

But then one day, I realized that what I had been calling peacemaking should more appropriately be called conflict avoidance.

Bruce: I was also a conflict avoider, though in a slightly different way. Outwardly, I worked hard to avoid confrontation, but internally, I was too often preoccupied with figuring out who was to blame. In my previous marriage, for instance, there were times when I saw her as the one responsible for the conflict between us. Instead of appreciating her strengths and what she contributed to our relationship, my attention would shift to what I believed she was doing wrong. It was then easy to cast myself as the noble one, quietly enduring the situation without complaint. The avoidance, judgment, and sense of martyrdom weren’t separate—they fueled each other. Every time I avoided a conflict, I added entries to a private account I was keeping — her balance went down and mine went up. My mouth may have been peaceful. But my heart was at war. And the war wore the costume of nobility.

Throughout my life, people had occasionally told me I was being a martyr. Friends would say it as a joke and I would laugh — I thought we were both joking. My counselor said it more directly, and I took it as good advice and tried to do something with it. But when it actually began to take hold were the times that Val said it. She would say it lovingly but firmly, and because I knew she loved me completely, the words landed differently. They were not advice; they were not a joke; they were the truth told inside love. They made me want to be better. They still do. This is one of the gifts a peaceful marriage gives — truth told inside love does work that the same truth, told from anywhere else, cannot.

We both now clearly see and understand that we were each conflict avoiders. Neither of us was actually peacemaking. Two shapes of the same underlying problem — a heart that was not actually at peace, doing work it wanted to credit as peacemaking.

We were both conflict avoiders. But many of you reading this may respond differently. Your instincts may be to lean into hard conversations rather than away from them. This is its own gift. But we have come to believe that a warring heart can hide under engagement just as easily as it hides under avoidance. The shape of the counterfeit is different; the underlying problem is the same.

Bruce: Something helping me to become more of a peacemaker is the long, slow work of truly understanding people who are wired differently than I am — to see them fully and honestly. People who lean into hard conversations because they believe honesty is the deepest form of love. People who would rather tell you the truth and live with the discomfort than spare you the discomfort and live with the lie. I have come to admire that. I have come to want some of it for myself.

One of the mistakes Val and I both made, across our first marriages, was treating the other person as if they should be us. We gave the kind of love we knew how to give. We were sincere. But we were each missing the actual person we were married to. They were each a child of God. They were not failed versions of us.

So what is peacemaking, if it is not the counterfeits we’ve discussed?

We encountered an idea years ago through Chad Ford and the Arbinger Institute, and it has stayed with us: the war is rarely in the words. It is in the heart. We have finally realized that it is possible to manage every conflict for thirty years and still have a heart at war. But it is also possible — we have seen this, lived it — to walk into a hard room with a heart that has already laid its weapons down. The peacemaker, who the Savior promised would be called a child of God, is not the person whose conversations are smooth. The peacemaker is the person whose heart is no longer at war.

This is also where Doctrine and Covenants 121 has been especially helpful to us. The Lord describes how the powers of heaven actually flow. No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge… And then the promise: thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.

This principle reaches far beyond priesthood. It applies to any position, any role, any responsibility through which one person tries to influence another. Without compulsory means. That is the line that has stopped us, again and again, over the years. The Lord’s actual power — the power He extends to those who are trying to become like Him — is non-compulsory. It does not coerce. It does not bend the other person’s agency. It does not produce peace by overpowering the conflict. It produces peace by being, in itself, the kind of presence that conflict cannot stay at war with.

This is who the peacemaker is. Someone in whom the long-suffering and the gentleness and the meekness and the love unfeigned have begun, slowly, to grow — and through whom the Lord’s non-compulsory power now flows into rooms that need it.

We are not there yet. We want to be honest about that. But we are trying. And we have come far enough that we can describe what it looks like when even a small piece of it is real.

We tell this not as a credential. We tell it because it’s the kind of moment that can still surprise us a little. The peace was already there before the cousin’s question arrived. We did not have to manufacture it in the moment, because the work of laying weapons down had already happened, built upon years of practice. That is what the years were doing. We did not fully recognize it at the time.

We are still learning to do this. Too often, the judgments come first, easily. The seeing comes second, slowly. But we keep trying. We have come to believe that this seeing is the most important work of peacemaking. The peace flows from the seeing. The seeing flows from a heart that is willing to be wrong about who the other person is.

Bruce: The martyr complex was the first warring heart I learned to name in myself, but it was not the last. They come back, often dressed as something noble, and someone has to call them by their name again. Val does that for me, lovingly and firmly. I am grateful. This is part of what becoming looks like — not a thing fixed, but a thing called out and laid down again, and again, and again.

We want to say one last thing before we close.

We ask ourselves a question, often. Where in us is there still a warring heart? Not in our words. Not in how we are managing things. In the place that no one but the Lord can see. We are still finding answers to that question that we did not expect. It is the work that does not end.

If you are still in the years where every conversation feels like it could break something — where you are buried, or where you are exhausted, or where you cannot yet imagine what it would feel like to walk into a hard room with a heart at peace — we are not telling you that you have to change everything today. We are telling you that what you are doing now is real, even if it is partial, and that something fuller is being built in you in the meantime.

It is hard. We will not pretend otherwise. But what is being made in you is real. And the years you are walking through right now — the years of trying, of failing, of misunderstanding, of being misunderstood — are not lost.

They are you becoming.