Weapons were buried today. On a desert mountainside at the edge of town, in the dirt, on purpose. Let me tell you what that means, because it is one of the more powerful things I have witnessed in this work.
I have been meeting with a divorced couple who are trying to fix their divorce. They were married more than twenty years and share children they both love deeply. They are not getting back together. That is not the goal. But they had not been getting along, and the same communication patterns that wrecked the marriage had quietly crept into their co-parenting, poisoning the very thing they both swore they wanted to protect.
Naming the Wounds
Over a couple of sessions, they made a list of the ways they had been wounding each other. Somewhere in the process they realized something most people never do. Every time they hurt the other, they were really hurting themselves, drawing back the same vitriol they had just sent out. The list was honest and specific. Guilt tripping. Capitulating just to stop the complaining. Evading direct questions. Using clipped short speak as passive aggression. Stonewalling simple requests for information. Firing off hurtful messages. Chasing the other person with irrational ranting just to provoke a reaction. None of it was an accident. All of it was a weapon.
An Ancient Oath
We read a short account together. An ancient people, deep in a cycle of war, where one group swore an oath to bury their weapons in the ground and never fight again, so that their children could inherit peace instead of the next round of bloodshed. When their old enemies attacked, those who had buried their weapons simply lay down and refused to fight. And in the very act of being struck down, they praised God with gratitude and humility. They had decided that some things were worth more than winning the next battle.
So it was with this couple. Decades of hurt between them, and they did the bravest thing I know. They wrote their own wrongs on paper, not each other's, and they buried them deep in the earth. A ceremony to make amends and move forward into a better future, for themselves and for the generations coming after them.
You may not be at war with an actual army. But most of us are at war with someone, and we have the weapons to prove it. The question is the same one this couple finally answered out on that mountainside. Are you willing to bury your weapons first, before the other person buries theirs, without any guarantee of what they will do? That is not weakness. That is the only move strong enough to actually end a war.