You will always be in conflict and there will always be a need for reconciliation and repair. The people around you are different than you, and your competing desires produce tension, sometimes agonizingly so. It is not hard to see the world around you is in turmoil. You are probably even in conflict within yourself. Repair, or reconciliation, is what brings all things together. Any beauty we see is the orchestrating of disparate parts into a state of resonance. We must learn to enact this type of reconciliation and practice it routinely. If we do not do it daily, things fragment and fall apart.
What do you do when things don’t go the way you expected, when bad things happen? When people do not give you what you want? When life does not give you what you want? You may try to seize control, demand what you want and fight, but you will eventually tire, and leave a trail of battered and bloody in your wake. You may be left wondering if you can find peace.
We must first learn to tolerate the tension that exists in ourselves. This is a trick in itself. It feels like all we can do some days to stand the upheaval going on inside our own bodies. It feels like an epic game of tug-of-war and you are the rope – people and forces on all sides, pulling and pulling with no thought of how you feel. It is no wonder this inner turmoil bleeds out into our relationships with others and the world around us.
If we are responsible, we will work to “contain” this unrest within and not take it out on others. This is a form of dying to self. It is choosing to accept and work through pain instead of finding someone to blame and/or hand it to. We must accept the pain and know it well. We all share in it, so we must all learn to still the competing voices and hear the one true voice that speaks to our pain. There is a depth of knowledge and wisdom that come to us through this process.
When we arrive at some peace within, we will be in better position to find peace in our relationships with others and the world around us. We can bring this peace to situations, rather than more conflict and violence. The more we learn to contain our own pain and be a container for the tension (whatever does not kill us makes us stronger), the more able we will be to do this. This is God’s endeavor in the world – to bring all things together.