Episode 22 // The Role of Jesus in Healing Our Divided Communities with Chad Ford

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In this episode of the Proclaim Peace Podcast, hosts Jennifer Thomas and Patrick Mason welcome back Chad Ford to discuss Christ-led peacemaking in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. They reflect on the implications of the election results and how they relate to the principles of the gospel and the teachings of 3rd Nephi in the Book of Mormon. Jen shares insights from her extensive work in politics and the conversations she has been having with others about the election, emphasizing the theme that peace was a significant factor in this electoral cycle. The episode encourages listeners to consider how to navigate the current political landscape with a focus on peacemaking.

Timestamps

[00:01:58] Peace fractured in society.

[00:04:27] Need for Jesus in conflict.

[00:10:29] Community conflict and collaboration.

[00:15:00] Building relationships in community.

[00:19:09] Destruction as a cautionary tale.

[00:22:25] Healing and discipleship Choices.

[00:27:36] Love and discipleship choices.

[00:30:40] Peacemaking in times of conflict.

[00:34:31] Embracing political differences.

[00:39:47] Restoration and reconnection principles.

[00:44:47] 70 times 7 forgiveness concept.

[00:50:14] Restoration from exile.

[00:51:20] Holding the center in conflict.

Transcript

(00:03-00:06) Jennifer Thomas: Welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. I'm Jennifer Thomas.
(00:06-00:16) Patrick Mason: And I'm Patrick Mason. And this is the podcast where we apply principles of the gospel and read the Book of Mormon to become better peacemakers. Jen, how are you doing?

(00:16-00:19) Jennifer Thomas: I am here, Patrick. I'm with you. That's what I can offer you today.

(00:19-00:24) Patrick Mason: You're here. Hey. I will take that. You're actually joining us from England.

(00:25-00:26) Jennifer Thomas: I'm joining you from London today.

(00:26-00:45) Patrick Mason: Fantastic. And we are also joined, normally we wait to introduce our guests until a little bit later, but because this is a repeat guest that our listeners have already gotten to know a little bit, we wanted to bring him on right at the beginning. And so we are joined today by our friend and colleague, Chad Ford. How are you doing, Chad?

(00:45-00:48) Chad Ford: I'm all right, Patrick, Jennifer. Better now that I'm here with you.

(00:49-01:47) Patrick Mason: Well, we are really glad that you are with us. Those of us who are regular listeners to the podcast know that we did a special episode right before the U.S. presidential election talking about how we could apply some principles of peacemaking to leadership and the way that we think about our participation in a democracy. And we are now after the U.S. presidential election in which the results have been announced and it's been decided. And so we wanted to talk about what peacemaking looks like in this particular moment. So, Jen, can you share, obviously, you are deeply, deeply in this work, especially with MLEG. I mean, you follow politics so closely, you've been so invested in all of the great work you've been doing. So where are you at and where, you know, the people that you're talking to, what kinds of conversations have you been hearing over the last week or two?

(01:48-03:29) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, I think this conversation is quite timely. We went into this election knowing that to some degree peace was going to be on the ballot. And we feel very lucky that we didn't have a lot of violence or peace post-election that we have not so far. But at the same time, it's clear, I think, from the just kind of public reaction in the last week or so, that peace can be fractured in a lot of different ways. Like it isn't just simply a presence of violence or an absence of violence, but peace is complex. And I think we all have to be honest about the fact that the way we have been doing sort of Politics and the way we are engaged with each other around social issues is fracturing our peace. And so we don't want to spend a lot of time doing an introduction, but we do want to just explain where we're coming from in this episode. We find ourselves in the Book of Mormon in 3rd Nephi. And 3rd Nephi is a book that is sort of the highs and the lows. We see some very hard things happen at the beginning of the chapter. And then we get to the point where we've got this glorious arrival of the Savior and the opportunity that he offers to people to live in a period of transcendent peace. And it would be very easy for us to jump over the first part of that book in order to get to the really awesome second part of the book. But we felt strongly that it was really important for us to have a few minutes, take a few minutes to talk about what it looks like in hard periods and what it means to be a peacemaker in a difficult period of societal change and conflict.

(03:29-04:26) Patrick Mason: Yeah. So Chad, I want to bring you in right away on this, that these early chapters of 3rd Nephi, but before we get to Jesus's coming, like Jen says, this is in some ways the you know, Nephite society at its most fractured, at its most tribal, or at least until the very end of the book where the society is destroyed. When you think about that moment in the Book of Mormon, and when you look around at especially, you know, we'll focus today mostly on America because of the the election. Maybe we can think globally, too. What do you see through the eyes of a peacemaker and somebody who has spent a lot of time in divided societies? What are the hallmarks or what are the things that you really pay attention to in terms of this kind of fracturing and tribalism?

(04:27-07:41) Chad Ford: I think the main point that I see is that they really need Jesus. And thank goodness he's coming. When I think about 3rd Nephi, and I also think about the sociopolitical conditions in which Jesus comes into his mortal ministry to Israel, at the time, I think there are some similarities there. Right. He's coming at a time of great religious upheaval, economic upheaval, violence. We don't quite have the same level of sort of imperial dominance that the Roman Empire was putting on the people of Israel, you know, at the time. But you're seeing division and conflict and people who have lost their way from the core teachings of which they adhere to, or believe in, in a lot of ways. And I think that When we get stuck in conflict and it escalates to the level that it escalates, whether we're talking about, you know, 30 AD in Judea, or we're thinking about where we're at right now in the Book of Mormon, there's a sense of hopelessness. There's a sense that the only way through the conflict is by eliminating or defeating whoever it is that stands in our way. There's a sense that, in very real ways, that force is the only answer left. To quote John Paul Lederach, our moral imaginations have dried up. There's a desert, really, of moral imagination now. And there's a lot of fear. that is rippling through these communities right now. And we all know what happens to human beings when we're experiencing high levels of fear, a sense of being unstable, right? We feel like we either need to flee or we're freezing Or fighting is the only way out of that. And our options just keep getting narrower and narrower and narrower and death, destruction. feels inevitable, right? Like it's the only path through for us now. And I think that you're seeing that at a certain level in both of these moments historically. And Jesus is going to come in different context, but he's going to provide an alternative. He is going to spark the moral imagination. And it's going to be hard for people to hear, right, because of the level of fear and because our options have felt so narrow.

(07:41-09:23) Jennifer Thomas: So you mentioned this, and I think, or Patrick did, that we've just come through this really bruising presidential election in the United States. And I like how you talked about moral imagination, because this election felt very, very high stakes to people on both sides. And it was often framed as a point of morality or that there was an absolute right or an absolute wrong. And while the outcome was electorally decisive, the popular vote margins were very, very tight with the winning candidate getting, I think right now they're saying 50.1% of the popular vote. And I only share that because it represents the way that we are almost evenly split as a nation over an issue of high conflict where both sides feel they have moral authority. And I just am curious to have you share with us what you feel in in a situation like this what discipleship driven peacemakers can do, regardless of how we feel we land on the issues in terms of morality. Does it demand that we harden our lines, that we push other people away that are different than we do? Does peacemaking demand that we just toss away all of our demands for moral urgency? That feels to me like an insurmountable tension. Either we've got this tension, and that's what is troubling me, is people saying, either I have to cut myself off from all the people who don't think like I do, or I have to just give up altogether for the sake of getting along. And my guess is that you don't see that tension as insurmountable. And based on all of your experience with conflict, what would you counsel us to do when we find ourselves in that point of extreme tension?

(09:24-09:46) Chad Ford: I, not only do I see it, I, I feel it, Jennifer, um, right. As a, as a citizen of the United States, I live here, I've got eight children. Um, you know, this is, you know, when I, when I've done a lot of my work with Israel, Israelis or Palestinians, I deeply love and care for those people, but that's also not my country. It's, it's also in a certain way, not my fight.

(09:46-09:47) Jennifer Thomas: You're at the remove, right?

(09:48-12:54) Chad Ford: Yeah, it's a little bit easier. It's hard, but it's a little bit easier for me to take a step back and know that I get to come home right to my place and not have to face some of the challenges that they face every day. And it's been several years now that as I've been making that journey back, to the United States that I felt deeply unsettled because I see similarities, growing similarities between the communities, my communities, and the communities that I've worked with and served for a long time. And so I find it deeply, deeply unsettling. And so I just want to be clear, I'm not some sort of neutral mediator here, right? I'm an American citizen. My family runs that spectrum, like a lot of people's families do, from people who are very elated at the results of the election to people who are absolutely devastated at what they saw. And I've been sitting with them while at the same time also sitting with my own feelings and emotions about this as well. And so I just want that disclaimer as we talk right now, because it's hard for me to just sit above all of this and say, well, now here's what we should do. Because I can tell you that I felt lost. I felt discouraged. I have experienced, like a lot of people, feeling challenged about what do I do next, or is there frankly anything that I can do? I will say that all those experiences that I've had, along with how I read the Book of Mormon and the New Testament, have changed my perception a bit about what's going on here, right? I've never been under the illusion that Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were going to save us. That an election in a divided community like the United States was, was somehow going to be a decisive win for us. And when I say us, I mean all of us connected together as a community. When I'm a mediator and I'm trying to work through collaborative solutions, the whole goal is collaboration. The whole goal is people walking away from the encounter feeling like my voice was heard, that this addressed some of the real needs that I face. And I was actually able to be helpful in helping others address those needs. And elections just don't work that way. They're binary choices, right? And they're framed, and especially this election was framed very deeply, intentionally by both sides, as a stark binary choice, good versus evil, with both sides to themselves representing the good, and the other side representing the evil.

(12:54-13:00) Patrick Mason: And I— Like democracy is at stake. The future of the country is in the balance.

(13:01-16:39) Chad Ford: Right. And so I've never seen the election that way. And again, that's partly my experience of working with people who are deep in conflict. Things like this are not going to make things better. I'm right because one side is going to feel deeply disenfranchised. Another side is going to feel validated in a way that actually discourages future collaboration together. Right. And so I've been dreading the election regardless of the outcome. Regardless of the outcome, right? I knew, no matter what, that there were going to be family members calling me sobbing, feeling hopeless, and family members calling jubilant, thinking that all their problems were now solved because Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were going to be, you know, the saviors. And again, this connects me back to Jesus, right? Because when politics becomes the way of identifying ourselves or identifying how society ultimately is going to thrive or die, there's a lot of dehumanization that's going to happen. And I think we put our faith in the wrong in the wrong thing at the moment. And so when Jesus comes to the people of Judea in 30 AD, who are looking for a Messiah, who's going to do exactly what Republicans hoped Donald Trump was going to do, or what Democrats thought Kamala Harris was going to do, he offers them a different option. about what it actually means to be saved as a community. And we rightly spend a lot of time as LDS people thinking about what it means to be saved in an eternal sense, right? And I think we don't spend enough time thinking about what it means to be saved with each other here in community. with each other. And I deeply believe, as I read the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, that the message is not just about eternal salvation. It's also about how we live in the here and now, how we usher in the kingdom of God here on earth. And we have to give to Caesars what is Caesars and give to God what is God. The politics part is Caesars, but our relationships and who's responsible for those relationships and who is responsible for caring for each other, that's something that to me comes out of my religious beliefs and connections to Jesus. And that very, very much is still on us right now, right? Post-election, that part still remains firmly in our courts about how we are going to build relationships or continue to destroy them. Are we going to block and unravel and build walls? Are we going to use these moments to find common ground, to find connection and unity. And to me, that is still very much a possibility that I see. But we're going to have to let go of the idea that Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or any politician is going to do it for us, or that an election is going to do it for us.

(16:41-18:57) Patrick Mason: I think that's so much wisdom there, especially in terms of like where we look for salvation, where we don't look for salvation. I also really appreciated your emphasis that I think one of the distinctive features of the restoration is this idea that part of our purpose, a major part of our purpose is to build Zion. to prepare the earth for Jesus to come, not just to wait passively for Jesus to come. And I want to sort of drill down a little bit to think about, you mentioned, you know, when Jesus comes in both texts, in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, He offers a very similar sermon, right? The Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon at the Temple, in most respects, they're quite similar. But the contexts are very different, and I'd love to hear you think through this, Chad, because as you said, in the New Testament, he's coming into this context where it's still a real mix of the Jews, the Romans, everybody else. But in the Book of Mormon, the wicked people have been destroyed, right? And in fact, in 3 Nephi 8 and 9, it's the voice of Jesus saying, I did it, right? Maybe we'll have a separate episode on that in terms of thinking through those. Those are some difficult texts. But you do have, you know, we talked earlier about, like, there's this hope oftentimes that we have that the other side will just be removed, right? That my enemies will be eliminated, and that'll make everything better. Well, isn't that exactly what happens in the Book of Mormon? And then Jesus builds this society based on the removal of certain kinds of people. And I wonder about the contemporary application here. Sorry, I'm throwing a lot at you. Just in terms of people sitting back and waiting for Jesus to come and solve all our problems for us. right? That actually 3 Nephi 6, 7, 8, these are prophecies about the last days, and society is gonna be so bad I can't do anything about it, so I just gotta sit back and wait for Jesus to come to remove all the wicked and to fix the problems for us. So how do you read these chapters in the way that the Book of Mormon thinks about this?

(18:57-23:40) Chad Ford: They break my heart. I can't speak to the motivation for why destruction was the tool that was used. But I do know that a lot of my brothers and sisters and their brothers and sisters died terrible, horrible deaths. I know from reading those chapters that there's this time of darkness and wailing and moaning and just devastation among the people who do survive those destructions and those natural calamities and what have you. And the wicked were fathers and mothers. They were friends, you know, to people. For me, to say the least, that's a suboptimal outcome to what end times looks like, right? That that people that are my spiritual brothers and sisters who came to this earth just like I did, looking for this mortal path to exaltation, would meet such an end. And to be truthful, we don't see that right now in the United States, but if we go to Gaza, if we go to the Ukraine, that level of destruction, that level of death that is hovering over those places is something that I can't see me waiting and praying and hoping for. Right. And so when I see those sort of moments, I see it a bit as a cautionary tale of what happens when we don't do what it is that we need to do when we don't take the care that we need to take care of. And the way Third Nephi is written, it does say that this is God's doing. But the truth anymore is with the awesome military power that we possess today, with the level of destructiveness of the weapons, we don't need God to do that anymore. We're perfectly capable of doing that to each other ourselves. And how we define the wicked and who deserves that and who deserves that level of destruction is to me part of the deep, deep problem that we're wrestling with. And so I see that moment, you know, Jesus, in some ways it feels like to the people of Judea in 30 AD, he gives them a path. We know that, for the most part, they don't take it, right? Because eventually, there's a violent Jewish rebellion, and the Roman Empire comes and squashes them for the last time and destroys the temple, all things that Jesus actually sort of foretold were going to happen. In 3 Nephi, the people that are left, I think, are in deep trauma. Whatever you want to say about wickedness and righteousness, they were part of a pattern of a conflict that was ongoing and longstanding. And in this particular case, partly how I read the Jesus parts of 3rd Nephi is there's a lot of healing that's attempting to happen here and a lot of teaching. And, you know, Patrick, it does have this amazing effect. But lo and behold, 200 years later, Aids start appearing again, and the Book of Mormon ends in genocide. And so whatever Jesus does in 3rd Nephi doesn't have the power to last forever. At some point, it became the responsibilities again of the Nephites and the Lamanites to take responsibility for their relationships to each other again. And so again, I look to those verses as a source of comfort when we are mourning. I look to those verses in the New Testament as hope when we feel like we are being oppressed or feel like we have had our rights taken from us, that we are facing an enemy. But in no way do I look at that and say that the solution, the best, the optimal solution to all of this is let's just wipe out. The wicked, the cost is too high and it doesn't last the way that we might think it would last.

(23:40-25:37) Jennifer Thomas: So, so I would just want to add to that, that, you know, Patrick mentioned this, but over the last few years, and I think it's really accelerated in the last, I would say 18 months, the people around me, I often hear a version of just people toss their hands in the air and just say, this is Jesus's problem, I hope he comes soon, there's nothing I can do, it's out of my control. And they see that I think as them pivoting to Christ but they are pivoting to him in a way that is an expectation that he will do this thing where he just solves the problem and it goes away and he eliminates any opposition and then creates peace. But I actually don't think that that is ever the message that Christ has given us. I don't even think that's the message he was giving the Nephites in that moment, post-destruction. I think he constantly is reminding us that as part of this mortal experience, and the Book of Mormon does this over and over again, it tells us there is no spiritual experience that can override our agency. There's no spiritual experience that we can be offered that absolves us of the choice of making the choice to actively follow Him, commit ourselves to discipleship, and thereby try to change the world. And so, you know, it's so interesting to me that We talk about how there was this beautiful period of peace following Christ, but people then at a certain point started exercising their agency to turn away from that. And so I guess we can look at that negatively or we can look at that positively. And I would love to hear from you, Chad, about how we can approach that positively. What can we as disciples of Jesus Christ, how do you as a person who's been deeply steeped in conflict, what are actions that we can take that are acts of discipleship that in these periods of difficulty demonstrate our allegiance to Jesus by moving actively towards peace, by making the choice to follow the path that he invites us on.

(25:38-33:42) Chad Ford: Well, Jennifer, I mean, I think you, you've summed that up so well. And when we're in the book of Moses, right, there's literally a moment where God's having a conversation with Enoch, where he tells them, I gave people their agency and he lists two sorts of agency that he gave them. One is whether to follow God or not, that they are, they are free to, they're not forced like Satan's plan to follow God and to love each other. Right? And then this is the moment where God weeps in scripture and says, but behold, they hate their own blood. And I think you're absolutely right. When Jesus teachings on the Sermon on the Mount, he's not blessing himself. He's not saying, blessed is me because I do these things. He's saying, blessed are you. when you do these things. When he's in the Last Supper and he's giving his last sort of mortal ministry lessons to his apostles, he says, As I have loved you, love one another. By this shall people know whether ye are my disciples. Right? Like Jesus In that moment where the disciples are bickering a little bit beforehand about who's going to sit where at the table, right? Where Jesus has come in and washed their feet, which Peter is objecting to in some ways because it's Jesus lowering himself. You know, to me, when I read that sort of pivotal moment, to me in the New Testament story. Jesus is like, I'm leaving you. It's going to be a mess. It's even my apostles don't have this right yet. They've been with me for three years. And I think about that all the time, right? If they've been like physically in Jesus's presence for three years, and they still don't quite have this Right. It makes me feel a little bit better about myself sometimes when I stumble, right? You know, with this sort of discipleship. And it's like he's talking to a child now and saying, look, if I have to sum up everything that I've been teaching you and everything that I've been doing, like, here it is. Right? As I have loved you. How is Jesus loved us, right? He's loved us dangerously. He's loved us without. Without condition, right? He's loved us wholly and fully, and now he's he's essentially connecting our discipleship to that, and he does the same thing in 3rd Nephi with his 12 apostles again when he tells them, hey, you know what do you want? I'm leaving. What do you want? And I don't know if you remember you just told them. what manner of men ought you to be even as I am. And nine of the disciples say, this is so wonderful. I've just enjoyed this experience so much with you, Jesus. I want to go speedily to heaven to be with you, which I really empathize with. Man, there's, I don't know about you, but there's days that I'm like, the other world's got to be better than this one, right? Like, you know, I, I'm, I'm over it. Uh, you know, it's, uh, that's where I would really, really like to be. And that's where I'm going to find peace. But then you have these, these other three, disciples who are actually ashamed when they hear that answer, because like, oh, man, maybe that was the right answer, right? Like, that's showing our love to Jesus, like how quickly, you know, we want to be with you. But they tell Jesus that what they want to do is they want to stay and they want to labor. Until he comes again, that they want to keep working with people the same way that Jesus was working with people. And Jesus says to them more blessed. are ye, and ye shall be even as I am." And I think about that. It's a choice that we have as Christians every day, right? Do I want to love Jesus enough that I can just speedily get to his side? Or do I love Jesus enough to join him in his work? which is healing the poor and the afflicted, helping the least of these, lifting those that are struggling or in doubt, connecting people to each other the way that Jesus did. And that's a choice, Jennifer, that in moments like this where man speedily going to heaven might feel like that is an easier path, Because I'm so afraid of what my future might look like. That is the moment. I don't actually think when peace building fails, I think it's the moment of its most clear call right to us. It's exactly in those moments. where we are needed the most, where the peacemakers are needed the most, and where we have some real choices that we're going to make. And so you talked about, well, what practically does that look like? And I just finished a book for Deseret Book and the Maxwell Institute called 70 Times 7. And I've been sort of thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years. If I was to distill it in a few things, and obviously, It's a complex topic and there's a 250 page book on it, but four things stand out to me a lot of like, what should we do today? right? The first thing is, I have to quit looking at whatever the other side is and seeing them as evil. And I have to start seeing them as my brothers and sisters who are making different choices than me right now. And then I have to start getting deeply curious about why they are making those choices. The definition of your evil, and that's why you're making those choices, or you're a sexist, or you're a racist, or whatever it is, are not deeply curious types of questioning or thinking about our brothers and sisters. I find that it will be complex, that there will be a lot of even sometimes contradictory motivations behind why they're making the choices that they are, and some of them we will just not agree on. that we will look and say, okay, I understand you, but I think you're landing in the wrong space here. And Paul refers to that as like seeing with the eyes of our hearts, right, instead of the eyes of our flesh. And I think politics really does drive us to seeing with the eyes of our flesh instead of seeing with the eyes of our hearts. If politics main idea right now is to divide and conquer, right? Jesus is actually asking us instead to unite and be able to see things deeply. Again, it doesn't mean that if you and I have a deep conversation, I see with eyes of our heart that I might agree with you, right? Or that we might not land in different places, but my guess is that we will start to find ground where we can work together, even if there is some ground where we feel like we can't. And that to me is a huge step in the right direction from where we currently sit. The next thing I think about is that Jesus invites us not to throw stones. Jesus rolls away stones, and it's natural in conflict when I'm feeling frustrated or angry or hurt to pick up that stone and chuck it towards someone right now. And I hear this language all the time post the election, right? Now we're really going to give it to the liberals. Um, now that we're in control, we're going to use every lever of power to dominate and subjugate them, um, to teach them a lesson. And we hear people on the left who say we are going to do everything in our power to obstruct you and make your life miserable, uh, and everything that we can to de-legitimize that. Or frankly, I'm just cutting you off. I'm just not talking to any of you anymore. You didn't vote the way that I wanted to vote. So, so we're done as a, as a sort of punishment.

(33:42-33:45) Jennifer Thomas: Or if things go wrong, it's all on you and you get what you deserve.

(33:46-34:59) Chad Ford: I'm tapping out. Good luck. Good luck over the next four years. I told you so. Right. And that sort of stone throwing only escalates conflict in deep ways. And instead, I think we have to think about how do we roll away those stones, right? How do we actually start to think about Where have I maybe offended you or harmed you in the past? In what ways may have I not been seeing you clearly? How do I roll away that sense of anger, frustration that you may be harboring in yourself? And I think this looks like in an election, a post-election setting, Reaching out to understand why our brothers and sisters voted the way they did. Reaching out to understand why they're hopeful or they're discouraged right now. Understanding in what ways I may have not totally labeled them in the most correct way or the way that they would see themselves. And start to try to figure out how do we offer grace to each other, right? And think about ways we can work together.

(35:00-37:38) Patrick Mason: Can I jump in, Chad, and I think you've got one more principle to get to, but can I jump in just with a concrete example of what that looked like this past week? This actually came from my mom. So she lives here in Utah, and she was a Harris supporter in this election. She had a sign in her yard, and people in her ward know that she was. And so she went to church on Sunday after the election. And there's a guy in her ward who I've met him. He's a really nice guy, great guy in the ward, but very clearly on the other side of it. He had been flying an American flag upside down in front of his house and all the kinds of signs. He was very much on the other side of her in this election. And he came up to her in church. and said to her, like, man, it's been a tough week for you, right? And she said, yeah. And he kind of gave her a hug and kind of walked away. And she told me, she says, part of her wanted to get into an argument with him or to do something. But she said she left. She went home. And she said, well, he didn't have to do that, right? I mean, it was nice of him to do that. So she reached out. And I got her permission to share some texts. And so she texted him. and said, thanks for the hug and the acknowledgement of a difficult week for me today at church. Your generosity rather than gloating, your friendship and kind words meant a lot. Thank you. And then he responded and said, you've been on my mind all week. Our politicians aren't afraid to turn us against one another in their quest for power, both sides of the spectrum. We may argue for the outcome we think is best for our country, ourselves and our loved ones, but our eternal connection will always prevail. Love you. And now I think there's a next step that they can now have a basis. They can continue that conversation, like you said, really show curiosity about what leads each other to have those different signs or those different symbols in their front yards. But that, I think, that's exactly what it starts to look like, to roll away stones, to not gloat or resent, but actually to lean into our points of connection. And I think that's exactly where peace building begins.

(37:38-40:52) Chad Ford: Well, Patrick, you actually described the third step that I was going to talk about, which is take the risk of embrace. Oh, all right, all right. And in this case, it was the man who decided to embrace your mom. He could have known that she might have yelled at him, that she may have said, don't touch me, you disgusting person who voted for the wrong thing or what have you. He took a risk. in opening up his arms to her and look at what it led to. It led to your mom re-pondering that relationship and how she might be seeing him. It led to her taking a risk of reaching back out. and connecting with someone that she might be actually angry with or frustrated with their choices or feel like he's leading the country in the wrong direction. And then you have this really sort of beautiful outcome that goes to show you that someone who voted for someone that she probably was deeply against could actually see some truth and some light around some principles about division. And what have you. I always find this to be the scariest thing because embrace is vulnerable and embrace is opening up our arms in ways that when we're angry or frustrated, we're more likely to, you know, sort of do this. It's inviting, but in a way that we don't always know the outcome to. I open up my arms, but whether the other person wants to take a step towards me into embrace is actually their choice right now. I'm actually inviting agency at that moment. And some will take it, some won't take it. Some might take it immediately, some might need a little more time to be able to get there. But that, like Jesus, our arms are outstretched. And then the embrace is a recognition that while there are things that divide us, there are things that deeply connect us together as well. And an embrace is something that is so, I think, important and connected. And then it really leads to the last principle. It's like that we constantly are yearning for restoration, to restore. Our goal shouldn't be winning a particular political point or issue. Our goal should be restoration. Our goal should be reconnection. And every action that I take, every word that comes out of my mouth, every interaction that I have with a person, I need to be thinking about, do I want to be right here? Do I want to prove a point? Or is what I'm actually sort of seeking? Which to me is in the internal cosmos of things of what we're seeking is return from exile. Return back to the state where we all once were, right? Connected, deeply connected together. That is the mission. Um, it is the goal, uh, and it, it needs to be in the forefront of our interactions, um, via text on social media, um, in front of people, how do I invite, um, restoration.

(40:54-43:09) Jennifer Thomas: So I was thinking as we were preparing this episode about the moment when the voice of Christ comes out. People are still in deep distress. He's been announced but then he says the following, O ye people of these great cities which have fallen, who are descendants of Jacob, yea, who are of the house of Israel. How oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and have nourished you. And again how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings. Yea O ye people of the house of Israel who have fallen. Yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, ye that dwell in Jerusalem, as ye that have fallen, yea, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not." And he just goes on and he talks about how he would have spared them and he says, gathered again, if you would repent and return to me. But if not, and then he says, you know, basically, you won't get my protection. But as I thought about that I feel like I reflect all the time. I try so hard to reflect on the fact that being a disciple of Jesus Christ doesn't mean that I just proclaim him as my savior or that I kind of worship him. But fundamentally it is a call for me to follow him, to do exactly what he did, to model my life after his and I'm tearing up a little bit because I find that so hard. It's such a challenge to do. But as I was preparing this lesson, I just thought of that image over and over again. He repeats it, I think, as many as 10 times in those scriptures. It's just ad nauseum, gather, you know. I just am wondering if you could help us understand, I think that's a privilege. I think we can see that as an obligation to gather and to nurture and to protect, or we can see that as a deep privilege that the Savior has invited us to be part of that work. Tell me, I mean, you've talked about this opening. Can you give us some advice of how to do that? When we feel so wounded ourselves, like how can we be the gatherers if we also are the wounded?

(43:09-48:25) Chad Ford: Yeah, well, Jennifer, that's that's so beautiful. I love that quote. You know, one of the things that's hard about Jesus. is that he actually came and spoke to a broken and wounded world. He came to a world that was deeply unfair. He came to people who were suffering mightily. um, and felt that the world was out of their control. Um, and, and he told them hard things. Um, I, I named my book 70 times seven, because I'm, I'm really struck by this moment where Peter comes to Jesus and starts to want to put limits on things, right. Um, you know, Lord, you know, you're saying, turn the other cheek and, you know, all of these other things, but come on, you can't really mean that, right. Yeah, there's got to be a limit. This is hard stuff, right? And he offers seven, which I think in Peter's mind was probably, that's a lot. I mean, that's a lot, but at least it gives me some sort of Yeah. Some sort of boundary, right? And at least when they cross that boundary, now I can act the way that I really want to act and get them back. And seven is a perfect number in Hebrew, and there's some symbolism there. And when Jesus says 70 times seven, I there's something deeper than, to me, a number. Seventy also in Hebrew represents completeness or wholeness. And when rabbis would multiply Hebrew numbers together, they were really trying to put a big emphasis. It's like you got a highlighter and you're underlining it like five or six times. And when I hear that response, that, Peter, what I hear is, until you are complete, until you are whole, you do this again and again. I don't care how many times it fails. I don't care how many times you or they decide that it's too much and you turn the other way. We keep doing it until we are complete. And, you know, that is the hardness of peace building, right? Why it's so hard, right? Because I don't know when that's going to be. And to be truthful in my own life as someone who's tried to practice these principles, I'm still incomplete. in some of the relationships that matter most to me. There's still people that I am not connected to in the complete way that I desire, that I believe God desires me to be. And that's frustrating. And it's hard and discouraged. And I wonder if they'll ever get there. Even if I open up my arms, are they going to continue punching me? Or will they ever step in? Will it happen again? All the different thoughts. And I think it's among the most audacious things that Jesus says in all the scriptures when he tells him that. But it also lays out the stakes really clearly, both with us, but I also think it lays out our stakes in our relationship with him. Because Jesus is all about 70 times 7 with us, right? Until we are whole, until we are complete again. When we are His disciples, we are actually trying to model His relationship with us. And I want to say one last thing. Patrick and I were talking this morning, and I've been reading this really—I'm Irish—I've been reading this really dark, depressing poetry. That's what we do well as the Irish, right? We can speak romantically about difficult, difficult things. And I was like, you know, I want to, I want to at some point read this poem Second Coming by Yeats. And, and a lot of people have heard about that, heard about it. And there's a lot of different layers layers to it. He's worried about a second world war coming. It's the second coming of the second world war. He's also thinking about the religious connotations and, you know, as as Christians, the second coming is this paradoxical thing. It's it's this great thing and the scary thing happening simultaneously. It's third Nephi again, right, that there's destruction next to this sort of beautiful sort of healing. And depending on where your orientation is, you might be like kind of focused on the scary apocalyptic part, or maybe it's the hopeful healing and reunion and joy that comes. And anyway, I was pulling up the poem, right, for our podcast. And I noticed I had something right underneath the poem. And I started to read it. I'm like, Oh, that's, this is actually the right thing to read, but I didn't know who the poet was. So I was, I was actually rapidly Googling. It was why I was a few minutes late, like who it is. And it turns out it's not a poet. It's an, an eighties Scottish rock band. And so I want to read you the lyrics.

(48:25-48:26) Patrick Mason: Oh, who, which band?

(48:26-48:27) Chad Ford: Deacon Blue.

(48:27-48:29) Patrick Mason: Wow, OK.

(48:29-50:34) Chad Ford: And I want to read you the lyrics to a song called Bethlehem Again. It was right under that. And just a connection, the last lines of Second Coming are, and what rough beast, it's our come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. This is Bethlehem Again. Tell me once, tell me twice, how it is that we begin again. Do we start off by clearing up the mess or just forgetting? The same way people try to kid you, kid you'd think, we're better off pretending. Just how far can we go without working out the ending? Sometimes it feels like the wheels of winter won't disappear. So we throw out a rope and hope it gets to the middle of the year. When we can't tell the land from the sky from the cloud, and nothing's clear, I guess a miracle's the only thing. That's ever going to work here. We stayed awake one starry night just to watch the sky turn and change and aim. Every step I take will lead me back along the broken road. So suddenly there's no day, no night, no earth, and no horizon. Everything that's wrong, now right. No moon or no sun rising. I can't tell my left from right. There's nothing to keep my eyes on. You've got to go back. gotta go back, gotta go back in time to Bethlehem to begin again, to Bethlehem to begin again. To me, the answer is to go back to Bethlehem, to go back to the gift that God gave us to get out of the acrimony and hatred and war that is, that his children, had engaged in for a long time. It's to go back to the Sermon of the Mount. It's to go back to Jesus once again. That is the hard road, the broken road, but the only way that leads us back to restoration from exile.

(50:36-51:19) Jennifer Thomas: Well, Chad, if I can add super briefly that almost freakishly today as I was out on a walk, I thought of the same poem and was reciting it in my mind. And it is a beautiful poem, but it's also very sad in many ways. And what I felt so overwhelmingly strongly was that the promise of Christ is that the center will hold. That as human beings, that's what we fear, that the center will not hold. But when he is at the center, that there's this deep promise that it will hold. And so I'm just so grateful you brought that up because that was just this little witness I had this morning that you know just this divine witness that I didn't need to fear that the center would hold as long as that was what was at my center.

(51:20-51:55) Chad Ford: And Jennifer, can I just add that your work is holy because it's exactly what you're trying to do, right? You're trying to hold the center. It's not popular work when we get in these binaries and people want you to choose a side, to gravitate to the left or to the right. It's lonely work sometimes to hold the center. But if it does hold, it will be because of you know, Christian peacemakers like you, everyone who are determined to hold it and center it where it belongs.

(51:56-53:00) Patrick Mason: I'm just glad I was here to learn from both of you. Thank you. Thanks to Jen. Thanks to Chad. I was so excited, Chad, to talk with you about these things that I didn't properly introduce you. Just for people to know, just point them to your book, Dangerous Love, Transforming Fear and Conflict at Home, at Work, and in the World. And you mentioned your new book, which will be out next year, Seventy Times Seven, Jesus's Path to Transforming Conflict. So, thanks to both of you, and thanks especially, Chad, for all of your insights on how we can continue to be peacemakers in divided times. Thank you. Thanks everybody for listening today. We really appreciate it. We just want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast and also to rate and review it. We love hearing feedback from listeners, so please email us at podcast at mweg.org. We also want to invite you to think about ways that you can make peace in your life this week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

(53:05-53:21) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you for listening to Proclaim Peace, a proud member of the Faith Matters Podcast Network. Faith Matters holds expansive conversations about the restored gospel to accompany individuals on their journey of faith. You can learn more about Faith Matters and check out our other shows at faithmatters.org.