Part 2: The Challenge Of Protecting Your Peace
Part 2: The Challenge Of Protecting Your Peace
Healthy boundaries, the wall of hostility, and peace in Christ
This newsletter is the second part of this week’s series, “To Give Your Life Away”, where I write about how the Gospel of Jesus offers a better invitation than some current cultural ideas and mantras on how to improve your life.
Before I begin this newsletter, I have to say the following: boundaries and even excommunicating people should always be considered, especially in relationships where you might be a victim of abuse.
Protect Your Peace?
“Protect your peace” is a phrase referring to removing people who bring negative energy, vibes and/or literal harm to your life. It also refers to ideas such as having healthy boundaries with things such as social media.
Born out of the health and wellness movement, it is a modern-day attempt to remedy the mental health crisis that has run rampant around the world over the last decade.
One of the trickiest pastoral conversations I’ve had with Christ followers is around the relational concept of boundaries.
Christ followers are called to be all-loving, inclusive, forgiving, and reconciliatory … but to what degree? And does this include all people, even the people who may be abusing us? How does the apprentice to Jesus Christ hold the tension between excluding people from one’s life (protecting your peace) while also adhering to the command to follow Jesus in all that He did, which was to sit and eat and include into His life, the very people who people disrupted His peace?
A modern-day conundrum for the Christ follower.
The Loneliness Epidemic
About a half-year ago, I saw a TikTok where a woman shared how she “protected her peace” to the point now where she lost all of her friends and community.
Yikes.
Currently, Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are the most connected generation to ever exist. But while this may be true, they are also the loneliest generation to ever exist.
Protecting your peace, when taken to the farthest degree takes us out of community, out of relationship and into the abyss of loneliness. It is the last thing this generation of people need when it comes to becoming people of agape love, because in order to become a person of love, one must experience love and be able to give love. And you cannot do that without being in relationship with others.
Again, protecting your peace, when taken to the farthest degree, will lead a generation further into isolation.
The Mental Health Crisis of Our Era
Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, aptly points out the rapid deterioration of the mental health of Gen-Z in his Substack article here. To reiterate, “protecting your peace” is a mantra that is born out of a place of great intent - to improve the mental health of a generation of young people riddled with anxiety and depression from the chaos they see everyday through social media and for some, in their everyday lives.
When Jesus said to, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Lk 10:27), there is enough there to say that Jesus cares about the whole person, including what’s going on in that brain of yours. Now, I don’t know if Jesus was thinking about the mental health crisis in the 21st century, but the principle remains the same: we cannot love God and our fellow human with our entire being if our mental health is stifled.
So don’t take “protect your peace” to the other end of the spectrum and throw it out altogether if you disagree with the phrase, because your mental health and the mental health of others does in fact matter to Jesus.
For The Christ Follower, The Peace You Have Now Was Never Yours To Protect
I think what I want to tell most people who follow the Ways of Jesus is what this little header says, so I’ll go ahead and repeat myself: the peace you have now was never yours to protect.
Read that again if you have to.
As with many new realities the apprentice to Jesus now gets to live in, one of them is that our entire concept of peace is redefined:
Peace no longer comes from external circumstances or variables, but comes from within as the Spirit of God dwells inside of you. (Jn 14:27)
Peace is no longer is a concept, but a person, and His name is Jesus, the Prince of Peace. (Is. 9:6)
Peace is no longer something you need to protect for yourself, but rather peacefulness is a state of being from where you can make decisions and navigate relationships from. (Ga. 5:22-23)
So, my fellow apprentice to Jesus, do we need to protect our peace? Where do we draw the line with boundaries with our fellow human?
The Apostle Paul, when addressing the division between Jews and non-Jews (Gentiles) in the first New Testament churches, writes,
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Ep. 2:14-16).
For the Christ follower, the question no longer becomes about whether or not you must protect your peace. Rather, it turns into a question of whether or not reconciliation is possible between you and the other person. Because “protecting your peace” presumes immediate excommunication to preserve the self at all costs, while the Gospel of Jesus moves the beloved to pursue reconciliation because through Jesus that was done for us. However, if one finds themselves in a relationship where the other party continually rebuilds “the wall of hostility” then the conversation no longer is really about “protecting your peace” but rather, about what they need to course correct in their life and whether they can see that.
As you go through this year and hear the phrase, “protect your peace”, I hope it reminds you boundaries are indeed important to make with people, but not to the extent of exclusion (unless necessary, i.e. abuse). And that as Christ followers, we are called to pursue reconciliation with one another, which for many of us will take a lot of time and a lot of work on both sides.
If you made it this far into the post, may you go in peace.
Live from a place of eternal peace.
And remember that Christ “Himself is our peace”.
Thank you for continually proving how much Gen Z especially needs the Gospel with the online messages that barrage them daily. Everything is piled on an individual’s shoulders.
We were just talking today about Peace, since that's the topic for Sunday. We also had a point of conversation about how to address Mother's Day, specifically how to be sensitive to people who are struggling with infertility, have dead kids or moms, etc.
At the time, I didn't think of it in terms of "protecting" their peace, but the conversation went much the same as this article. I feel deeply for people who are aching over that, but also "rejoice with those who rejoice" and the people who can't do that need Jesus-peace, not avoided-all-triggers peace. Thanks! Super helpful for furthering the conversation!