Everyone says they want peace. Yet our homes, churches and nations keep sliding into conflict. Jesus called peacemakers blessed, but he never said peacemaking would be easy.
These seven stories about peace and war, retold in our own words, range from gentle parables to hard truths about what war really costs. Each closes with a takeaway for sermons, classes or personal reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- The King's Contest: Painting a Picture of Peace
- The Weight of a Snowflake
- The Hidden Cost of 'Smart' Wars
- A War Correspondent on the Myths of War
- The Priest and the Principal
- A Chair in the Shade: Monks Brawl at the Holy Sepulchre
- Martin Luther King Jr. on Loving Your Enemies
The King's Contest: Painting a Picture of Peace
A parable.
A king offered a prize to the artist who could paint the perfect picture of peace. Hundreds of paintings arrived, and in the end the king narrowed them down to two.
The first showed a still mountain lake under a blue sky, its surface reflecting the peaks like a mirror. Everyone who saw it agreed it was the picture of calm.
The second showed bare, jagged mountains under a black sky. Rain lashed down, lightning flashed and a waterfall thundered over the rocks. It looked anything but peaceful. Then the king noticed a small bush growing from a crack behind the waterfall. In it a mother bird sat on her nest, quiet and unafraid in the middle of the roar.
The king chose the second painting. Peace, he explained, is not a place without noise, trouble or hard work. Peace is being calm in your heart in the middle of all those things.
Takeaway: Jesus promised a peace that the world cannot give (John 14:27). It does not depend on calm circumstances but on a secure place to rest.
Source: Traditional parable; author unknown.
The Weight of a Snowflake
A modern fable.
A small bird asked a dove how much a snowflake weighs. "Nothing more than nothing," said the dove.
"Then let me tell you something," said the little bird. "I was sitting on a fir branch when it began to snow, gently, without any storm. I had nothing better to do, so I counted the flakes as they settled on my branch. I counted more than three million. Then one more snowflake landed, nothing more than nothing, and the branch broke."
With that the little bird flew away. The dove, who had been something of an expert on peace since Noah's day, thought about it for a long time. At last she said to herself, "Perhaps only one more person's voice is needed for peace to come to the world."
Takeaway: Your voice for peace may feel like it weighs nothing. But change often comes when one more ordinary person adds their weight.
Source: Retold from Kurt Kauter, New Fables: Thus Spoke the Marabou.
The Hidden Cost of 'Smart' Wars
During the Gulf War of 1991, television audiences around the world watched grainy footage of laser-guided 'smart' bombs hitting targets with apparent precision. It looked clean, almost like a video game.
The reality was messier. On 13 February 1991 two bombs struck an air-raid shelter in Baghdad's Amiriyah district. The coalition believed it was a military command centre. In fact it was full of families, and at least 408 civilians died in the Amiriyah shelter bombing.
Most of the bombs dropped in that war were not 'smart' at all. Large numbers were cluster munitions, which scatter many small bomblets over a wide area. A share of them fail to explode on impact. According to Human Rights Watch, those leftover bomblets went on killing and maiming civilians, many of them children, long after the ceasefire.
Wars also destroy power stations, water supplies and roads, and the sickness and hunger that follow can claim lives for years.
Takeaway: Whatever we believe about when war may be justified, we must never let clean images hide its human cost. Christians are called to see the faces behind the footage.
Source: Information reported by Human Rights Watch and in John Pilger, Hidden Agendas (Vintage, 1998).
A War Correspondent on the Myths of War
Chris Hedges spent much of his adult life as a war correspondent, reporting from Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was shot at, imprisoned, beaten, deported and shelled.
Out of that experience he wrote War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and in 2003 an article for The Nation on the way the press glamorises conflict.
His message is blunt. War, he argues, is dirty and confusing, and can be "perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind". Most of those killed in modern war never see the people who kill them. If we truly saw what weapons do to human bodies, and what killing does to the minds of the young people sent to do it, words like glory and honour would ring hollow.
Takeaway: Peacemaking begins with honesty about violence. When we stop romanticising war, we are better able to pray and work for peace.
Source: Chris Hedges, "The Press and the Myths of War", The Nation, April 2003.
The Priest and the Principal
A conflict counsellor once received a call from a parish priest. He and the principal of the parish school were barely speaking. The counsellor agreed to help, but first asked each man to write down privately what he thought the problem was.
At the first meeting they sat opposite each other and read out their lists. The priest went first: "I feel the principal resents me being in the school. I'd love to be more involved, especially in religious education, but I feel pushed out."
Then the principal read his: "I feel the priest doesn't want anything to do with the school. I can't understand it, because we desperately need him, especially in religious education."
Takeaway: Many conflicts are not about what the other person wants but about what we assume they want. James tells us to be "quick to listen, slow to speak" (James 1:19).
Source: Traditional story; author unknown.
A Chair in the Shade: Monks Brawl at the Holy Sepulchre
Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands, by tradition, over the place where Jesus was crucified and buried. Several Christian communities share it under an arrangement dating back to Ottoman times, and for generations they have guarded their portions jealously.
On its roof sits the small monastery of Deir es-Sultan, which Coptic and Ethiopian monks have disputed for centuries. Each side keeps a monk on the roof at all times to protect its claim.
One hot day in July 2002, a Coptic monk moved his chair a little way into the shade. The Ethiopian monks saw it as a move onto their territory. Words turned into shoving, and shoving into a brawl with chairs and iron bars. News agencies reported that eleven monks were injured.
Takeaway: It is painfully easy to fight over the place where Jesus died while forgetting what he died for. Jesus prayed that his followers would "be one" (John 17:21).
Source: Reuters, 29 July 2002.
Martin Luther King Jr. on Loving Your Enemies
Few people had more reason to hate their enemies than Martin Luther King Jr. He received constant death threats, his home was bombed, he was smeared as a communist and he was arrested again and again for demanding equal rights for Black Americans.
Yet one of his best-known sermons is titled "Loving Your Enemies", published in his collection Strength to Love in 1963. In it he argued that hate multiplies hate in a descending spiral of violence, and that hatred damages the hater as much as the hated.
Love, King said, is different. It has creative and redemptive power, and he called it "the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend".
Takeaway: Loving our enemies is not weakness or approval of evil. It is the hardest and most powerful way to break the cycle of hatred, exactly as Jesus taught in Matthew 5:43-48.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986).
Final thoughts
A painting, a snowflake, a bombed shelter, a reporter's warning, two men with lists, a chair in the shade and a sermon from a man who was hated. Together they remind us that peace is fragile, conflict is often foolish, and love is stronger than both.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Which of these stories will you pass on?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.