The Tough Stuff
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Our Guests
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Author of Fire By Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament and How To Have An Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace. Pastor, parent, and pollinator gardner
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Betty is a Conflict, Change, and Leadership Specialist at Credence and Co., with over 28 years of experience as a coach, mediator, trainer, facilitator, consultant and writer. Betty specializes in working with complex challenges, supporting leaders and their organizations to be at their best. Betty’s capacity to care deeply, listen well, and provide wise and thoughtful support allows her to help her clients engage in tough, meaningful, and important conversations, set directions, and achieve positive organizational change. Betty’s PhD (Free University Amsterdam) considers the intersection between conflict transformation and contemplative spirituality.
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Brian Zahnd is the founding pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the author of ten books. His most recent book is “When Everything’s on Fire.”
Travis, Stephanie, Jennifer and Deborah from Many Rooms Church Community, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Links and Resources
Books
How to Have an Enemy, by Melissa Florer-Bixler
The Space Between Us, by Dr. Betty Pries
When Everything’s On Fire, by Brian Zahnd
Music
First Communion, Dane Joneshill
(Spotify | YouTube Music)
If I Could, Dane Joneshill
(Spotify | YouTube Music | Apple Music)
Notable Quotes
How can we talk about following the teachings of Jesus in difficult contexts?
It's very hard to do nonviolence on our own. It's much more effective, I think, much easier to do nonviolence when we are supported by a larger community of faith that can carry our nonviolence for us. ~Betty Pries
Making a decision towards nonviolence is a lifelong commitment. It's something that we need to be trained in, over and over and over again as we age and as we encounter new situations. Nonviolence is not something that happens out there. It's something that happens first and foremost in my own heart and spirit. ~Betty Pries
If you're talking about a situation of ongoing abuse domestically within a home, I mean, the first step is to find safety… I mean we do prioritize that immediate, “let's find safety” and then if the person is going to eventually recover at some point, the issue of forgiveness comes up. And the forgiveness is not, as I've already stated, it's not a declaration that they have not been wronged and that the offender was not acting wrongly. ~Brian Zahnd
I’ve always thought that the love that Jesus offers us is incredibly robust, right? Because it also is a love that takes into account that we are accountable for the harm that we do to one another. That harm, abuse, destruction, cannot be healed or changed or altered by ignoring it or pushing it to the side, pretending it didn't happen. There’s something consistently in Jesus where he talks about repentance. ~Melissa Florer-Bixler
My love of one neighbour may make an enemy of the other neighbour because they’re different responses to different neighbours and the different struggles that they have. And so, I think that we find ourselves perplexed sometimes by that complexity of loving one neighbour or making an enemy out of another one, or how to respond. ~Jennifer
Not having been someone who faced serious abuse I don't know whether this applies, but it does appear that healing involves actually starting to understand the abuser and recognize that perhaps they're not the enemy, they are also a wounded person, and somehow that it actually can help to know that this person isn't necessarily an enemy. ~Stephanie
Your body is his temple. So, if someone else is damaging that, it's damaging your spirituality as well. Yes, definitely get out of bad situations. You don't necessarily have to hate them, but you can leave that situation and grow, learn. ~Deborah
Sometimes when it's not under our control, we're going to suffer because we are peacekeepers, but where it's under our control we do our best to be loving, yet you know, make that space between you and the abuser. It's not worth it. ~Deborah
In our everyday life, what is the hardest part of loving our enemies?
If we could love ourselves deeply, and I'm not talking about ego-love, like I'm better than everybody else, I'm just talking about loving myself, as the person that God has created me to be. If we could do that, we wouldn’t need to get defensive all the time. If we could do that, we wouldn't need to externalize our self-hatred and put it onto somebody else. If we could deeply love ourselves, we could more easily love the people around us, because we would see their brokenness. ~Betty Pries
It's a spiritual commitment to resist the temptation to only listen to those who affirm our perspective, that we're right and they're wrong. It's a spiritual commitment to not listen to only those who think that we're right and they're wrong. It's a spiritual commitment to say I am choosing to see the image of God in this person, even when I feel like this person has not behaved to me according to the likeness of God. ~Betty Pries
An enemy is a person whose story you don't know. ~Brian Zahnd
The whole thing seems hard... And when it feels hard. I just say, “Yeah, it’s because it is hard.” But what I don't think needs to be hard about this is that we have to feel a sense that loving our enemies is something like emotional manipulation. It doesn't have to be hard in that way. I really appreciate that at no point does Jesus ever say. “Oh, you actually have to, like, feel really good about doing this.” Or, “You know, you have to just think positive thoughts about the person who has done harm to you.” And instead, we have this Jesus, excuse me, who continues to pray Psalms of Imprecations, Psalms of justice in his own prayer life… Jesus also has the space to recognize and name to God the fullness of this anger… Telling people who've experienced harm that they have to feel a particular way, that's something that we need to resist. ~ Melissa Florer Bixler
