It’s the part of The Biggest Story when the narrator says, “The biggest surprise to everyone was that the Chosen One of God was chosen by God to die.” Without fail, my six year old says it in a voice thick with emotion: “That’s not very nice.” Her young mind is trying to reconcile two seemingly opposing ideas—God is good, but he sent someone to die, and that’s not nice. I’m always struck that she uses the word “nice,” because of course it’s not “nice,” but how do you respond to these kinds of things? This is the stuff that rolls around in parents’ heads, along with “How many snacks do these kids need?” and “How long has this chicken nugget lived in this car?”

Good things aren’t always “nice,” but I’m not sure how to help my six year old understand. Honestly, I’m not even sure how to help myself understand. I know God has been doing a work in my heart for years, exposing all the ways I’ve kept peace instead of made peace, and in doing so ironically inviting further division, corruption, and conflict. It’s an ever-present lesson and battle, a bright flashlight I keep on my tool belt that never fails to reveal lots and lots of darkness. “See that horror, Caroline? Make peace there.”

I guess I want to tell my kid that God is making peace instead of keeping it. That making peace always has a painful cost, but that keeping peace has a more insidious cost that’s buried deep and shaves off pieces of our souls without us realizing it.

The story of yet another story Black man murdered calls to mind these costs. I say it with a lump in my throat and heat behind my eyes. “Someone has to pay.”

You feel it, right? The horror of this moment in time, the heaviness of all the stories (so many stories!), the obvious value of the life snuffed out, the thick blanket of darkness that is tossed over our hearts when we see such a plain disregard for human life—not to mention the bigotry that lurks in our very souls. In our very souls! God’s peace-making work in my life has been training me to see people I love in the victim but it also teaches me, if I’m willing to shine the flashlight over the darkest corners of my soul, to see myself in the perpetrator.

These severe injustices simply cannot go unanswered. “Someone has to pay." I say it both with anger that extends outward and conviction that extends inward. Can anyone make peace here? I don’t know how, but somehow the complicity in our own hearts does not necessarily snuff out the desire for justice. It bubbles in our blood, offering a small glimpse of the One whose image we bear.

My six year old is right. It wasn’t “nice” for God to send Jesus to the cross—but it was spectacularly good. God was not going to let atrocities go unanswered. Someone had to pay; someone had to pay to make the peace. The gift of this often makes me feel physically weak. Thank you, Jesus.

Even before God sent Jesus to die, we hear his fiery call for justice, for true peace-making, through his prophets. It’s the book of Amos that I keep running to, and the words stick to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter: 

“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:21-24).

It’s as if God is screaming through his prophet Amos: “I hate the nice things you present to me! I can’t even look at them. Bring me something good instead—bring me justice.” God’s people had become oppressors and were too comfortable or lazy to see it.

To my white, Christian brothers and sisters: We have to consider the ways we’ve kept peace instead of made it. We have to consider the ways we’ve been choosing “nice” over “good,” to the profound detriment of our souls, our gospel proclamation, and our family, particularly our brothers and sisters who sit outside our place of privilege. We seem to have earned an unexamined master’s degree in marketing that compels us to rebrand bigotry, hustling for angles that make horror more palatable or convincing ourselves not to see or hear what is plainly displayed—because perhaps there’s more information somewhere that will help us sidestep this whole thing.

Wouldn’t that be nice? We pull out a heavy paint can of Nice and start brushing it on thick and clean.

The Nice we paint upon one another seems like a favor and a peaceable act, but souls are rotting beneath. The paint convinces us things aren’t what they are and tempts us to forget the good news on the other side of confessed sin: Someone has to pay, and Someone did. We deserve death but Someone Else died instead. This is better news than a coat of paint can offer. Instead of marketing, with its nice-for-the-eyes but deadly-for-the-soul brand campaigns, we can choose what is honest. Though it slices, it slices like surgery, bringing life from what would’ve been death. It pierces like nails, bringing redemption from what should’ve been damnation.

From what I can tell, we have two jobs:

1. Make peace—not keep it—on our insides. Making true peace means we refuse to let the bigotry that lurks in our souls to continue to allow us to be oppressors who are too lazy to see the oppression. We confess our sins to the Lord, daily, hourly, every moment, marveling that Jesus’s blood covers even this but refusing to “go on sinning that grace may abound” (Romans 6:1). He paid, but we surrender all. We make repentance as much a part of living as breathing because we know this is the first step and possibly most essential step to loving others well. We abandon the allure of “nice” in favor of “good”—stepping out into the painful process of internal peace-making (sanctification) every day, knowing it’s God’s will for us (1 Thessalonians 4:3), knowing as long as we live on earth, God will need to expose the horrors in our hearts that we might repent of them and be shaped more into his image. We surrender all to him—even that marketing degree and desire to keep the peace—and we commit ourselves to the costly, good work of peace-making, longing for the day when we will be sanctified completely (1 Thessalonians 5:23), forever freed from evil in our hearts and the weapons we wielded on earth.

2. Make peace—not keep it—in our communities. Making true peace in our communities means the faith at work in us is put to work around us. It means we join in the Lord’s call for justice here on earth, setting aside a false “nice” gospel in favor of the good, true one. We aren’t fooling the God Who Sees when we rebrand horrors or become too lazy to acknowledge them. We do the groaning world no favors when we endorse a false gospel that forgets about justice, when we refuse to be haunted by God’s warnings throughout scripture to those who use their power to oppress. Instead we use the resources around us to learn and unlearn, and we use our living rooms, our churches, our parenting, our friendships, and our text threads to repent in community, to call weapons by their real name and to disarm them inch by inch. When we’re met with a sideways joke or comment that damages image bearers and we are tempted to keep peace, we choose to make peace instead. When we’re tempted to keep peace by withholding accountability, we care for the souls of our brothers and sisters and choose to make peace instead. When we inevitably mess up ourselves and are called out, we don’t keep our personal peace by rebranding our sin or indulging in offended-ness and casting ourselves as the victim, but we make peace by confessing our sin to those we’ve injured and letting the gospel work in us.

Following the Lord had always cost everything, but we’re bolstered to do the work because we know the ultimate cost has been paid, and we know the One who paid the ultimate cost will never leave us and will help us every step of the way. Justice can flow down from our peace-making efforts just as justice flowed down from the peace-making act of Calvary.

May God strengthen you to make peace, no matter the cost. May God energize you with the goodness of the gospel that covers you. May “justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Our faith is not a nice faith—but praise God, it’s a good one.

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“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:9-10).