visible conflict and who avoid the difficult and costly work of forging real reconciliation. Such people, however, are not peacemakers. They are peace-fakers. Avoiding conflict is not the way of God, and doing so does not make us His children. The apostle Paul tells us that God has “reconcile[d] to himself all things … making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). Through the cross, we discover God’s kind of peacemaking. It is costly and painful. Jesus forged peace not by denying the presence