We have designed this blog in an attempt to do at least three things
1. To make it in such a way that we would like to visit it. Often we have found that people communicate to others in ways that they would find either boring or unhelpful.
2. To pass on key principles, interesting ideas, inspiring approaches, different perspectives and useful information on ways to build peace, enable friendships, encourage forgiveness and foster reconciliation.
3. To convey our values and principles to you without you really noticing. We want to do this in a similar way in which a person begins to share the perspective or the likes/dislikes of a new friend.
Assumptions
You should know that we are working from the following assumptions.
A. That people are basically similar to one another.
B. That conflict is normal and a continuous feature of any relationship, though mostly the issues of conflict are not openly addressed between people.
C. That it is not surprising that many folks turn to aggression or violence in the face of conflict.
D. That peace itself can be boring unless we have some purpose or activity to be involved in while we are at peace – either with ourselves, with another, in society or between countries.
E. That a fact of life is that there are facts of life; for example, if someone hurts another person, that act is complete and is a fact. There is nothing that can be done to take away the fact of that action. What we are always left with is the question of how we will respond to what happens in life.
F. That peace-building and forgiveness and reconciliation are usually difficult and people often want to avoid the work that is required to pursue them.
G. That in any situation there is always hope.
H. That anything we communicate in this blog will require you to adapt it accordingly to your situation to make it relevant and worthwhile.
I. That in every situation there is no one best model or approach to apply to it.
J. That in any of this work there should be a flexibility, a willingness to drop what you have planned to respond to a more pressing or important need and that any work, you do will always be limited but can be significant.
K. That forgiveness seems to be very widely misunderstood and is important in any relationship.
L. That it doesn’t take many folks to make a big difference (positive or negative) to a situation, issue or community.
M. That we have listed too many assumptions already and it’s likely that you are losing interest in them.
