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.
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