Do you know what the number one cause of divorce is? Lack of communication. Problems with your teen? Communication. Bullying… Communication issues. War, Terrorism, Atrocities – all the result of poor or misguided or intentionally misleading communication.
It saddens me to think of all the lost lives, wasted money, misdirected effort and agony that gets poured into war. This is an unpopular opinion. You’ll be told that a show of force is necessary to effect peace. I disagree – wholeheartedly and unconditionally. God gives us tons of evidence regarding how to live, how to survive and how to get a long. All we have to do is look around our physical world to find answers to any question we may posit. Pants on fire? Jump in a pool of soothing cool water. Certainly you don’t want to run into a burning building to put them out. But isn’t that what we do when we use hate, killing and death to “destroy” our enemies? Aren’t we trying to fight fire with fire? This is an extremely unpopular point of view these days because a lot of effort has gone into making sure that folks see war, defense, killing, etc as a “necessary evil”. But it isn’t. It isn’t because the root of all these problems is the same – poor communication.
Do you think you are any different from a person in the Middle East, Europe, the Far East or any other place? Do you think that you want different things? Inherently, good people want to care for their families, help their neighbors and live in peace and love. Unfortunately the nature of governments is such that the peaceful rarely have a voice, and the aggressors are willing to take control by whatever means necessary. Let’s face it – most of us are not willing to do what is necessary to advance in this kind of climate. We are willing to turn a blind eye in order to feel safe. But there is great danger in that.
Most people just want to enjoy life and care for their families and friends. I said most, because some have an unnatural yearning for power and control – one we can’t understand so we choose to believe it doesn’t exist. But it does, and war is the perfect evidence of this fact.
Communication will solve the problem of war. When we communicate to our brothers and sisters that we really only want the same things they want. When we listen to them and help them solve their problems which cause hate, distrust and conflict. When we realize that we have given a tremendous amount of power to people who don’t have our best interest at heart and communicate that to each other and to our global friends and families, then we can start to fix this world. We can start to understand the problems which plague our fellow human beings and help solve them. We have the means, ability and resources to do this! But we choose to hate, destroy, kill and control. Why is that? Because we don’t communicate.
We really need to talk.