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Diana Oestreich Biography

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“I'll never stop acknowledging the pain of others, because empathy is the flashlight leading us toward wholeness and healing. If we ignore those in our world and our neighborhoods who are in pain, we will ignore our own healing. We suffocate our own hope, because we are connected to each other. Waging peace is believing that the best for another person is the best for myself, my country, and my world.”

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“We were outsider, yes, but insiders to a hard-won truth: giving your life away is the only way to truly find it. Loving our enemies is what transforms fear into freedom. Love has the power to change us. As Dr. Sabah told me that first day over tea, “when one of us is cut, we all bleed. That is humanity.”

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“You can build something new, one person, one relationship, one meal at a time. You can build friendships instead of watering the flowers alongside our long-held fences. You can choose to believe in the unshakable goodness of those across the Pew or political divide. You can choose fierce kindness by speaking the truth to people about the impact their decisions make on the vulnerable. You can call Self Supremacy the liar it is. It's a bait and switch.”

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“I'm fighting for your freedom and my freedom. We must have Brave conversations. We must find out what we don't know. Waging peace requires that we have the courage to face what's broken first- in ourselves-and then in the system affecting those around us and uncover who has been harmed and how we are connected to them. Because we are intertwined together. Love speaks the truth of the harm done, while unshakable goodness holds space for the offender at the table. We all have a seat at the peacemaking table. Love is refusing to take away an oppressor’s chair at the family table while at the same time taking the stick of violence out of their hands. Because violence ricochets and is absorbed by the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. It's time to center their pain and to put ourselves between them and the violence.”

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“Refusing to acknowledge the historical trauma of those around us is a cultural tradition many of us have been handed down, generation to generation forming our foundation of erasing wrongs so we don't have to right them. But we can change these traditions and narratives. The world can change, because we can change. I have so much hope for you. I have so much hope for me”

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“Love is what I'm arming my son's with to go out in an angry and hurting world. This is the truest gift I can give them-an arrow to load in their bow and a solid Bullseye to aim at. It's a posture to live from, to love from. The power to decide ahead of time how they will show up for the neighbor nobody likes and how they respond to the bully on the playground or to the violence and uncertainty this world is going to ambush them with.”

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“It took me being faced with a choice whether to take a child's life to make me able to surrender to the undeniable call to love my enemies. That was the first time I felt pulled between what God was asking of me and what my country required of me. God wasn't calling out my bad theology- God was confronting my Unlove.”

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“If choosing to love first can change enemies into friends on the battlefield of Iraq, I know that it can right here, in our own neighborhoods, churches, and families, who are battling over politics, religion, migrants at the border, and who belongs in America. Love is the foundation I'm planting feet on.”

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“No one who goes to war ever really comes back. I had lost things, had parts of myself taken away from me, not all of me boarded the plane to come home. The war also liberated me to love those I've seen as an enemy. It gifted me with knowing what I would die for and what was worth living for; being the first to love every single time and waging peace as if my life depended on it.”

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“We decided that we would be the first to love every single time. Because Love Never Fails. We were going to throw kindness around like confetti, to love like it was growing on trees, without needing to determine if the person in front of us deserved it or not. This was our family's Battle Cry. Committing ahead of time to show up with people meant our decision was already made. We stopped talking about what peace might mean and started being peace. We did it because peace isn't the absence of conflict it's showing up in the middle of it.”

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“It took a war to shatter the singular lens of Us Versus Them. It took meeting the people I've been told were my enemy in order to value those I've been told were my enemy back home where I lived. Before the War, I view the world through lenses obscured by false patriotism, white supremacy and self-centered religion. I didn't even know I was wearing these glasses or seeing the world through them until I went to war and saw my beliefs in action. Bullets and bombs cleared my ears to the still soft voice of the Divine “But I love them Diana, I love them too.”

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