Music.
What's going on, everybody, and welcome back to Episode 9 of the Villequan 11 Podcast.
Today, we have our first interview where Scott Harris from Greenmount CBC joins
us and talks about peace, specifically what it means to have a peace witness for today's Dan Tom.
So, without further ado, let's take it to 11. We'll be right back.
Music.
All right, guys, we want to welcome you for our first interview here on the Life on 11 podcast.
Today, we are really pleased and honored, would we say, to be joined by Scott Harris.
Scott is, most importantly, a follower of Jesus Christ. He is a husband and a father of three.
Scott is also the pastor of the closest CBC to our congregation,
As the Crow Flies, over at Greenmount CBC, where you've been for a few years now, five years.
And Scott also serves on the Blue Ridge Regional Board.
And so we're really glad to have Scott here. The one thing I will say is it's
good to have Scott because he runs.
And there's never been a runner on this podcast, not one time.
Running is not a thing. Has there ever even been a runner in this studio?
Maybe once. Really? Maybe. Who? Get back to that. Okay, we'll get back to that.
So what's up, Scott? How you doing today, man? I'm doing wonderful. Glad to be here.
Always excited to talk to you guys because I enjoy your company. That's it.
We play some old man basketball. You've heard us talk about old man basketball
on the podcast. I'm one of the old men. Yep.
He's one of the more athletic old men, let's be clear. That's right.
All of a sudden, when Scott came to play, the whole pace of the night just seemed
to pick up a little bit. It's the running thing again.
I love it. I love it. So, Scott, we invited you in today to talk about peace.
I know a little bit of your story on how you've developed, and I know that's
something that you're really passionate about these days.
And so, as we had this conversation, we would just love to hear from your heart
about peace, especially Christ's peace.
So, I guess the first thing that we would ask you is, how would you define peace
from a Christian perspective from where you come from? Okay.
Well, so first I'll start with the just things that agree with what everybody thinks peace is. Yeah.
Kind of tranquility, not having disturbances, no violence.
Those I think are generally what people think of when they think of peace.
The difference is that's like the edge and just like the...
The start of Christian peace. It's the beginning, the very outer shell of what Christian peace is.
When you look at peace, especially from a Bible perspective,
you've maybe heard the Hebrew word shalom.
So that is the word in the Old Testament that peace gets translated out of a lot.
And its roots are more in wholeness and completeness.
So really, if you want to see what a picture of peace looks like, we go back to the garden.
We go back to things are ordered and the way God designed them.
And after the fall, anything getting to peace has to be a restorative movement.
It has to be God fixing what we've broken.
And so eventually we know the crown jewel of that restoration is Jesus.
And that's why he's the Prince of Peace, the King of Peace.
His message is the gospel of peace, all these different ways peace gets connected in.
And so eventually, Christian view, big picture of peace, it starts with our peace with God.
It has to start with that reordered relationship, things getting back right with us and God.
And then from there, it can't stop there.
And kind of back to my story, early on, I would say that's kind of where my
understanding peace had stopped, is I'm good with God, so I'm good.
Then as we especially read Jesus and read, I guess, a more peace-visioned reading
of the rest of the New Testament to the church, we see that that peace is then outflowing.
And it's not just our relationship with God, but then it's our relationship
with one another and our relationship with the whole world. is we are agents
of reconciliation. We are ambassadors of that restoration and we become workers of peace.
We become the peacemakers. So...
Nutshell that that's my gal. I really appreciate how you talk about how it has to begin.
It has to begin with Jesus, right? Which is something the world doesn't do,
but then we become agents. Like we still have a part.
And I think for me, that's where I've seen the church really fail is either
they say we have no part in doing peace.
That's only God's job, or we have to be the ones making peace.
So therefore that empowers wars and conflicts and things like that. All right.
I see a t-shirt idea here. Okay, let's go for it. You know, people have the
DEA t-shirts and the DEA jackets. Uh-huh.
A-O-P. Agent of Peace. Okay. Okay. I like it. We need them. Okay.
I thought you were going to say like PEA for like Peace Enforcement Agency and it would say P.
See what I did there? No. I would wear A-O-P. Okay.
A-O-P. A-O-P. Agent of Peace. Okay. Okay. It's done. Fair enough.
Fair enough. In-store shelves tomorrow.
It's happening. Okay. Done. Done. You better hope it's ready because someone
might actually try to buy one. Who's going to listen to this before tomorrow? seriously.
Scott, Jeremy and I were talking a little bit as we were getting ready for this
podcast. Jeremy, you grew up Mennonite.
Oh, yes. And I grew up in the Church of the Brethren, but yet peace for us was
not something that was discussed at the congregational level.
I didn't. Surprising, believe it or not. I like brethren my whole life.
And the first time that I ever realized that the Church of the Brethren was
a peace church was when I went to the Church of the Brethren annual conference in 2008.
And that was, it was news to me like, what? Like, and for me,
the first time that, like, we talked about being peace agents of peace was when
it was time for me to register for the draft.
My parents were like, oh, by the way, you need to register as a conscientious
objector. I'm like, what?
So then we have a conversation about it. I'm like, oh, okay. Okay. That'll work.
Yeah. Yeah. Now you did. Surprising, right? You didn't grow up in a peace church atmosphere.
So what was the thing? Like what, what, what drove you to start unpacking this
piece, this, this piece a little bit more?
Yeah. And, uh, so I grew up in the Baptist background.
Mom left a Baptist Bible study to go have me. And then I was back pretty much
the next day. So that's how Baptist I started.
But once was one say you were predestined to be in Bible.
Okay. Let's not get into that conversation. So, and I guess another,
so not only the church background, but I was also a military brat.
So my dad was in the military for over 20 years, most of my childhood, Marine Corps.
And so it was a huge part of how I understood the world.
So not an emphasis at all in church
that i guess we're
really the point where i start to realize that there
were believers who had any kind of
different perspective on peace than what i had growing up which again
i think it kind of stopped at the point where we need to have peace with god
which is absolutely true and right and is the starting point but right out of
high school So I then went to EMU and I met a lot of different people with a
lot of different perspectives on a lot of different things there, one of which was peace.
At that point in my life, I was not at a point where I was an AOP.
I was not an agent in peace at all. In fact, I was an antagonistic.
I was an arguer.
I enjoyed getting into a good tango with somebody. I had some zingers.
Right? I loved it.
Let's argue. Let's figure out what. You can still break a zinger out every once
in a while. You don't have to give them all up.
Fair enough. We are pro-zinger here on the Life on 11 podcast.
Pro-zinger. That's another shirt. Well, because I know it can lead me down a
path I don't want to go. Fair enough. I get it. I got some fences there.
So here was my going into EMU, a very midnight, very peace, conscientious environment.
And this was right after 9-11, right?
So there is significant discussion about these things.
So my rolling in there, I took the biggest American flag and Marine Corps flag
I had in the house and hung them up just to stir up stuff.
And yeah, the point where things, I realized something was off in my perspective
was my roommate was not saved.
And at one point somewhere at emu he
was there for sports oh he he would have
dominated our old man basketball league okay it was you don't know him anymore
do you yeah we we don't want him no he's out of the area okay yeah all right
good for us good for yeah he would have basketball yes for sure but somewhere
near the end of the first year he said he we just had a talk and he was like i I don't understand.
I came here, Christian College.
I was like, I'm assuming I'm gonna be the bad guy at this school.
But people seem a lot more angry and upset about you and the things you say than me.
And I still don't understand what you all are fighting about.
And I slowly came to this realization that I had not shared the good news of
Jesus with this person who I had lived with for almost a year.
And no one at this Christian college had shared the good news of Jesus with
this person that did not know Jesus.
All he knew is that we had some disagreements about how we followed Jesus that
we were willing to not be friends about.
Wow. Okay. And so I got to peace just simply through, do I really think the
gospel is the most important thing?
Is the message of Jesus the most powerful and most important thing in my life,
in what I'm communicating to the world?
And I really got convicted that it wasn't. I had, after that,
I had a couple more moments.
I feel like really bad that one of the pivotal moments in this story comes from
a movie, but you know, that we're in an entertainment age and entertainment.
Have either of you all seen the movie End of the Spear? Yes.
Yep. I have not. Okay. It is based on real life.
Missionaries, 1950s, go to Ecuador, minister to some of the most violent tribes there are.
And a line in that movie just hit me and I could not get it out of my heart and head.
One of the guys, the son is asking this missionary father, you know,
what happens if they try to kill you?
Are you going to shoot you? Are you going to defend yourself?
And he tells his son, we cannot shoot the Wadani.
They are not ready for heaven, but we are. Oh, wow.
And man, that just hit me like a massive boulder.
And all the like, what if scenarios, you know, the robber comes into your house
and they got a gun at you and you got to defend yourself. Right.
You got to, you got to fight back.
Well, I'm pretty sure that person needs Jesus. If anyone clearly needs the work
of Jesus in their life, they need that, that peace, the rest of restorative
work of Jesus in their life.
I think they're first in line of, of need.
And. It's a good perspective. Putting my life on the line seems like small,
small thing if that person comes to a saving faith.
And so that slowly, slowly, like the peace boulder just started rolling down
the hill, gathering steam.
By the time I get to Greenmount, you know, I've taken some seminary classes.
I've run into some of the radical reformers.
The story of Dirk Willems. You familiar?
I'm not. Early Anabaptist. After, during the Reformation movement,
he is arrested for baptizing.
Okay. Not allowed. We just do that with babies. So he is, he escapes prison,
he's fleeing, runs over some thin ice he can get over because they haven't been feeding him good.
The people chasing him, not so much. When he goes through the ice,
he turns around, saves the deputy that's trying to arrest him,
and they still arrest him, and then they burn him at the stake. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.
Right. And just, you know, I'd start the Anabaptist movement,
the Brethren Church coming out of this war between three church states.
The Reformed Church, the Catholic Church, and the Lutheran Church are fighting each other.
All people who say, we're for Jesus, and they're killing each other.
Like, how does this fit? How does this make sense? Yeah.
And so by the time I get five years or so ago, I get to Greenmount,
I'm more peace church brethren than most people.
And it sounds like our congregation was a lot like the two congregations.
A lot of people are like, what are you talking about?
Like, wasn't even, I think, brought up in my interview. They wanted to know
a lot of things about what I believed.
That really wasn't one of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting to
me, Scott, because I don't know.
I'm not from Broadway, right? I grew up in Augusta County.
And moving down here, I realized very quickly that military service means something
in the town of Broadway, right? They've lost a few young men in battle.
It's big in all the sports programming, the service, all those things.
But what I find interesting is next to Broadway High School is the John Kline Homestead,
who is sort of like the brethren patriarch of peace in his work during the war
and tending to those soldiers.
It is that is fascinating to me that the John Klein Homestead property line
literally backs up to the Broadway high school property line.
And you have on one side that the the if I were to maybe this is an overstatement,
feel free to check me on this, guys.
But it feels like a lot of times, especially with the young men in Broadway,
they would be told the most honorable thing you can do is die in war.
Yeah. And then you have John Klein, who's like the most honorable thing you
can do is save someone's life, even if they're trying to kill you.
And those two things literally bumping up to each other on property lines is
really interesting to me. Yeah.
And we don't talk like we don't talk about that. Yeah. No, no, we don't.
So how does how does your your new views on peace new ish?
You know, you talk about coming from a military family. How's that?
How'd that go? Like, if you don't mind me asking. Yeah.
So I would say as as that conviction took more root, I'm someone I had plenty of guns in my house.
Right. I had 1911, 22 Ruger, two shotguns, right?
Enjoy shooting, target shooting, skeet shooting.
Not great at it, but enjoy it still, right?
And eventually I get to this place where I convictionally, if someone breaks in, I'm.
There's no thought in my mind that says I'm going to go for a gun.
That's just not anything.
And so at that point, they're just in my house and become a risk to children in my house.
And so the conversation with my dad then of, hey, this is where I've kind of got to.
Are you okay just housing all of my guns at your house? Because I don't have
any use for them in my house. because if someone breaks in, I'm not going to
use them in my house ever again.
And so they're fine to be at your house. They're well kept at your house.
And if I go shooting, I know where to find them, right?
Little tense conversation, but thankfully me and my dad have got to a place
where we can have, we don't agree 100% on how we live out our lives for Christ.
And we've got to a place where we can have some pretty tense conversations and be okay.
And so I'm not disowned, right? There's some tension around those things.
I'm not to a place where, you know, I'm calling people unfaithful if they're
not non-resistant or non-violent or pacifist or however you term it.
But, right, I just, so that would, I'd say, was like the clearest moment where I had to like,
My conviction's got a point where this is the next appropriate action that I'm going to take.
It's also when I became brethren, there were a lot of conversations I had with
some of the folks with On Earth Peace.
That's supposed to be an organization focused on peace.
And as I got into what they were doing and how they were communicating peace,
it was not the kind of peace we started talking about.
It wasn't centered around Jesus, that God, man, starting with that right relationship.
It was all temporal, small doses of bits and pieces of the kind of peace God wants us to have.
And so I had some pretty intense conversations there, too.
They're like, I'm not sure you really understand peace. I'm like, I'm pretty sure.
I think I do. That's what I was going to say to you.
So, I mean, then through those conversations, yeah, well, I mean,
really through those conversations, I got to share the gospel with people.
I think they love peace. They have peace as an objective, but they're far from peace.
And so, yeah, I think that's, those are some pretty intense things as well.
And now as a pastor, I have some folks that have served in the military in my
congregation, and so we've had some pretty in-depth conversations.
I've got people that have served in Vietnam in my congregation,
so we've had some conversations, and it's good. Mm-hmm.
I'm sure.
So one of my questions then, Scott, for you, like, I feel like one of the things
that really divides people about peace is you have your ultra, ultra pacifist.
That is like absolutely pieces.
Peace almost becomes God is what my experience be for some of my friends who
are ultra peace, like peace is their God.
Jesus isn't their God. God isn't their God. Peace is.
And then you have your super like conservative folks are like,
do what you want. Like, I'm not giving up my guns. I'm going to shoot someone like that.
What do you think are some, could I use the word common sense ways that Christians
can live out and try to work for peace in your experience?
Can you just think of, hey, if you're trying to discern this,
here's how your journey started.
Here's ways that we could work for peace in our communities that don't make
people be like, oh man, those guys are crazy.
They're ultra right or ultra left. They're just common sense Christians.
Can you think of some ways that we could practice those things as Christ followers?
Well, so I think when we talk about peace, a lot of times we go straight to
the home invasion scenario, the military scenario.
And we really just should start with how are we interacting with our neighbors kind of scenarios.
And having, you know, being close to a situation where people are yelling and
screaming and there is a, it's an altercation.
It's not maybe quite fistfight yet, but stepping into that and trying to get
everybody to calm down enough.
And like, what are we, what, what is the issue in sharing the gospel,
figuring out where are, are these people believers or not believers?
And if someone's not a believer.
How can I get this pointed toward Jesus? And that has maybe been one of the
bigger places. It's just those kinds of interactions is when there's lost people that,
they're going to act like lost people. And one of the biggest ways we can interject
Jesus into the conversation is saying that we don't need to fight over this.
The other pieces that I would say is, again.
Pre Scott being an AOP, I would have not seen any issue with me getting into
a pretty heated argument with other Christians.
We're just working stuff up. I would have cited iron sharpens iron,
and this is what it looks like.
But it didn't include gentleness and love and kindness. It was devoid of the fruit of the Spirit.
And until my roommate there at EMU said, I don't understand what's going on,
he didn't see Jesus because we weren't acting like Jesus.
One of the times I got into one of those kind of arguments, it was with someone,
that had a different view of baptism than me.
I mean, it got so ugly that they brought a track to me the next day,
because they just assumed I couldn't be a follower of Jesus.
Now, I won that argument, I'm pretty sure.
May the record show. So I think that's another thing.
So when I do have disagreements, like the on earth peace folks, that was not me yelling.
That was not me saying you're an idiot, right?
That was not me demeaning or any of those things. It was a very different conversation
than what it would have been before.
Just that my whole outlook on how we should communicate with one another is
completely different because peace is just a part of who I am.
I mean, if that was one of the primary objectives of Jesus and how he was doing
things and what he was about.
That needs to be on me, too. And I think we can get to some of those more like
what if, like bigger, harder situations.
And I think the peace church witness in violent places is just so much more impactful.
They're hungry for a king that says peace is the answer.
You know, I'm thinking here for the average person, though, like not someone
who's in law enforcement or in the military.
I mean, the thought to go to the argument of what if somebody breaks in my house,
I'm going to shoot like you're talking about a very unlikely scenario,
especially around here. It's less likely to happen.
If I give out your address, it might be a little bit more. Well,
now that I just said that. Yes.
Well, so let me let me give you an example from being a dad. Right. Kids fight.
What? Are you kidding? I know. Pastor kids fight, too. What? Yes, I know. Shocking.
That's the next podcast. Things you didn't know.
So, so my middle daughter, she's our, she's our fighter.
And last year she had an arch nemesis.
This child was seemingly a bully. It was not a friendly situation.
And, you know, we expressed to her that we don't know what's going on with this
kid's family. We don't know what he's got going on.
We, we told her that just try to be nice.
Conquer evil with good, right? Something I did appreciate from Unearthed Peace
is they like Martin Luther King. And he says a lot of great things.
Something he said about peace was, you can't conquer darkness with darkness.
You can't conquer hate with hate. No, you conquer darkness with light.
You conquered hate with love.
And so those were some of the things we started feeding into our seven-year-old.
Went on a field trip with my daughter. this just a couple weeks ago that arch
nemesis is now one of her posse best friends. Mm-hmm.
Love turned it around. Yeah. So if it can work for seven-year-olds,
I think it can work for us. Yeah. So, and that's a- Adults have a lot of pride.
Yeah. So that's what makes it hard. Yes. Well, and I think if people that hold
this conviction would be doing more with their kids, so it's something that
it's part of their framework from the beginning.
I mean, I wish it was a part of my framework from the beginning.
I think it would just be more natural for us because at this point,
I don't think it is natural. Like a lot of us, we had to look at our WWJD bracelet
and say, oh, yeah, that's right.
Jesus didn't call down the thunder. And even then, like, but what becomes?
It's always, well, Jesus flipped tables.
Okay, so we're going to pick one instance.
It's like we picked the anomaly instead of talking about all the times that
Jesus did resist that. Even not talking about Jesus, just in the world today,
everything is about you.
You do you. You do what's best for you. You do what makes you happy.
And that drives people being mad at each other because I'm going to do what
makes me happy. I don't care what makes you happy, you know?
And like, yeah, that drives all of it.
When you talked about, I mean, even in the church, I mean, I can tell you we
have a pretty easygoing congregation. There's not a lot, but I've been in some business meetings.
I've been in some ecumenical meetings. I've been in some denominational meetings
where, I mean, if a non-Christian walked into that event, they would probably
be like, this is not something I want to be a part of.
We don't even practice peaceful relationships with the people who are supposed
to be our brothers and sisters.
You know, it's like even in the world of the church, our first instinct can
become create conflict or lean into the conflict in a way that's, I mean, violent.
You know, or I can tell you, like, one of the things I think in church that
really ruins our peace witness is the amount of, like, passive aggressive behavior
that the church has. And they do so in the name of peace.
Right. They're like, well, and, you know, that was always my one of my big things
with the denomination we came from was I said the tagline should have been passive
aggressively simply together.
You know, because there's so much passive-aggressive behavior in the church
that I think sometimes we even mistake passive-aggressive behavior as peace
when it's not sometimes more damaging than just letting it go, you know?
You mean someone trying to convince themselves that it's peace.
Yes, yes. Even though it's passive-aggressive behavior.
So the church I grew up in, just so far out of peace was thisâ.
One huge split I witnessed was over music, those drums of the devil,
even though they're in Psalms.
That's going on the Things You Didn't Know podcast for next time.
Right, watch out. The other was the translation of the Bible we used.
Both of those issues, I was old enough to be in those meetings,
and half the church walked away in both those situations.
Like, how in the world does that point people to Christ? It just doesn't.
Yeah. Oh, there's so many examples of that. Yeah.
And as I, you know, start to witness more and like being more open about my
faith, I found that was like one of the biggest hindrances is just people.
I know so-and-so and like they're, they're terrible. Like they're hateful.
They're always doing this thing.
Another point where, again, I kind of recognized in myself that maybe I wasn't.
So I worked at Fraser Quarry before I became a pastor.
So that's a mining operation, truck drivers, all this.
For about a year and a half, I did a truck driver Bible study in the mornings.
Captive audience. It was first come, first serve on getting the loads and getting loaded up.
And so drivers would show up over an hour early before we opened.
I was like, hey, I could do this.
Maybe a little God doing God things in me.
I decided I was going to go through the Sermon on the Mount.
With these folks. And when, when I tried to explain what loving an enemy,
I just couldn't get my head around how I could explain that in a way that included
bullets or knives or fists.
Right. I mean, you just had to stretch some things really, really far to,
to take Jesus's word there and still live in a way that's not makes you look
crazy and so at some point I'm okay looking crazy.
Saying yeah yeah what a just yesterday
at church we read the if we are out of our mind it's for
christ's sake right like okay that sounds good to
me and yeah and that's the thing is like our world has gotten so far away from
what god intended god shalom that that that actually looks crazy when in reality
everybody says i mean what's the old thing like every miss america always says
well what's your one wish world peace like we all say we want it but when it
comes time to actually practicing it and putting,
I mean, I had some long debates with some friends about the amount of money
that we spend in this country on militaristic efforts and bombs and tanks, all those things.
And I mean, I wasn't even saying defund the military. It's not what I was saying.
I was just saying like, what if we raised what we're doing for the oppressed
and social work, things like that, something that I'm super passionate about.
And we took some money from our militaristic fund, not defund anything,
just the amount of money.
Like we spend more on military, on guns, ammunition, and bombs in this country
every year than like 75 of the rest of the world has in their entire country's budget.
You know, that's insane to me. And in that when we talk about,
you know, the way that we're spending money in this country.
You know, I'm not saying get rid of all the military.
I'm not saying it like, but can we really look at how much of our
country's resources we put into violence
and then you're going to turn around and say we need more
gun control and it's like hold on a second like yeah that there has to be a
bigger conversation about how that scene is set for us yeah uh and it's as i
had a conversation with a guy in our our congregation the other day and we were
talking about just like how this how this works out in our heart and how,
we can separate what we read in scripture from the reality of our lives.
And, you know, we were talking about Jonah and Jonah being super pissed and
angry that the Ninevites actually repented.
And we were like, come on, man, that's no way to be a prophet.
This is like, how could he act like that?
But if we frame that around something like 9-11, and you think how many Christians
would have been willing to go overseas to be a missionary at that point and
say, these people need Jesus.
No, everyone was chanting, these people need bombs.
People were like, yeah, absolutely, cheering on, let's wipe them all out.
But that was the situation for Jonah. I mean, I'm sure he had loved ones that
the Ninevites had grossly murdered.
And they were the worst people in the world.
But yet God sent a messenger of grace and peace to them. And they accepted.
And so often, we're not even willing to be that messenger.
We see the outsiders, whether they're overseas or people we don't agree here,
the lost. And we say, good riddance.
They're going to get what they deserve. Instead of saying, we are the AOP.
We are supposed to be these ambassadors.
And so taking our representing Christ seriously to the point that it's going
to make us look different.
Our priorities are going to be different.
People are going to think maybe we're a little crazy sometimes.
But if that means one or two of them find Jesus, that's what we need. That's it. All right.
I got to, just you talking now, maybe think of a tagline to go on the shirt. Okay.
Okay. So when we were playing basketball, a lot of times I say,
the ball don't lie. Mm-hmm.
The tagline on the shirt could be, the Bible don't lie. There we go.
I like it. True. Huh? I like it. I like it. All right, it's happening.
You know, Jeremy's wife does dabble in the t-shirt business.
She does. So, I mean, we could. T-shirts, cups.
All of it. All of it. Everything. I like it. I think, and again,
I think a lot of times we just, we don't have a holy creativity.
We think the only way to solve problems is we've seen it effectively done through
violence, through domination, through being the loudest, most argumentative person.
We've seen that can work. Again, I was one of those people.
I know it works. I was bullied. You know how I fixed the bully problem?
Violence. Right. Right. It's effective. But it's not the way Jesus pointed a storm.
And it's throughout the Bible. I mean, probably one of my favorite non-peace,
non-violence verses comes out of the Old Testament.
Elisha, the Syrian army comes against him.
And his confidence is not, he's at his house with his servant.
The servant's freaking out. The Syrian army's here. What are we going to do?
He's like, God's army's here. My faith is in God's protection,
his power over this situation.
He asked God to let the servant see, and the servant sees the armies of God
surrounding the earthly armies. And he's like, oh.
And a lot of times that's where we would finish. But then Elisha asked God to
blind this army. He leads the Syrian army into Jerusalem and they feed him a meal.
They feed him a meal. They just don't, right? I mean, sometimes the easy answers
are just maybe we should just have a meal together.
Maybe we should just go have some coffee and we could work this out.
And then the Syrians didn't attack Jerusalem for a season because,
I mean, that's shalom. That's peace.
Where as soon as the army was brought in Jerusalem, the prince was like, kill him, kill him.
I mean, he was exactly how most of us would default.
But Elisha was like, no, right? Why would you do that? That's not the God you
serve. He's a God of mercy and grace.
Yep, amen, amen.
Well, Scott, we really appreciate your time. We could do this for a few more hours.
In fact, we'll have to have you back another time. We can continue to talk about
this. But it has been really, really amazing conversation.
And again, I think I wonder how much richer maybe my understanding would have
been of peace if it would have been something talked about from from kindergarten
or from preschool up instead of literally walking into my first conference in
my 20s and going, what, a peace church?
Like, that's a thing? Yeah. Oh, man.
So I don't know. But no, I can agree. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, God bless you on your continued work at Green Mountain,
all those other places. And we will definitely have this conversation some more later. Thank you.
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