Suggestions for discussion among your immediate family, friends, fellow faith seekers, and co-workers: 

What’s important? What do people really want and need in order to establish a healthy sense of peace. Please, add your insights: 

• A safe place to make and call home. A healthy and diverse diet. Regular exercise. Outdoor time.
• Fulfilling and growing relationships. Someone to listen. Someone to hear. The trust of others and people to trust.
• Meaningful work. Measurable goals. Long term ambitions. Short term successes. A community of like-minded colleagues.
• On-going and life-giving connections with blood family and family of choice. Opportunity to enjoy long-established friendships, even friends from early childhood. 
• A meaningful role in a faith or service community. Engagement in a beautiful vision.

What do people really not need? What undermines peace? 

• Threats, real or imagined, to safety and security. Growing financial stresses.
• Ambiguous relationships, those that are conditional, a trade, tight-rope, unpredictable relationships. Come-here, go-away “friendships.”
• Responsibility without authority. Shifting goal-posts. Being blamed.
• Working under fragile or sensitive leadership — a threatened boss. Leaders or bosses who have favorites, Leaders who bring fragile domestic circumstances to work.
• A faith community with controlling leadership, rigid rules, operating from gross or subtle platforms of manipulation and blame.