“Our enemy is the person just on the other side of our empathy.” —Osheta Moore
On one of our immersion trips to Israel-Palestine, a team of church leaders faced the reality behind a suicide bomber’s headlines.
While browsing the news just days before the trip, the team leader noticed something terrible: a young Palestinian man detonated a bomb on a public bus, killing himself and several Israelis.
With unrest in the region growing, the group decided to stick with the plan.
The team arrived at a Palestinian refugee camp and began to notice a stern young face staring back at them on posters all over the camp. Everywhere they went, they saw the young man’s face plastered on tents and sign posts.
“Who is that?” one of the team finally asked.
Their hosts explained this was the young man who had blown himself up on the bus just days prior. They shared that, after the young man’s family was killed by the Israeli military, he became very quiet and then went missing for a while. The next time they heard anything about him was in the same terrible headlines the team leader had seen.
After sitting with some of the young man’s family, hearing his story, and eating a meal in the camp, the stunned team climbed back onto the bus to leave.
Are we more committed to simple headlines than to the empathetic, uncomfortable, pain-absorbing way of Jesus?
Are we willing to enter into the peacemaker’s complexity, or will we choose simpler stories that offer us easy answers?
What do we do when expectations of hostility end with hospitality?
These questions haunted the team, they haunt us, and we pray they haunt you. We live in a world of endlessly accessible information, but information is not understanding, knowledge is not wisdom, and being ‘right’ doesn’t make a person loving.
As we look back at ten years of forming Everyday Peacemakers, we’re asking you to help create transformative experiences like these. Will you give $10 a month to fund the next ten years of inviting people to move from simple headlines to unlikely friendships, following Jesus past the simple stories and into the better Way.
Our future, and the future of our neighbors, our children, and their children, depends on us doing this work. Please join us.
As we turn 10, will you consider giving $10/mo to fund 10 more years of forming people of faith into Everyday Peacemakers?
Author: Matt Willingham
Matt Willingham is a writer, photographer, and content creator with over ten years experience living and working in some of the hardest-hit conflict zones in the world. He and his wife, Cayla, are now based in San Diego where they’re raising three little peacemakers and working to promote empathy and understanding in their community.
@matt.willingham