To avoid confrontation is not the same as making peace. Being loving doesn’t have to mean condoning. It certainly doesn’t mean giving up your integrity for the sense of a false peace. It doesn’t mean overlooking. It doesn’t mean pretending. It doesn’t mean always going along. It doesn’t mean always giving in.

Sooner or later, whatever it is you have to confront, you have to confront it. At some point, it is your pretense or it is your honesty that is confronted, beloveds. You can no longer sweep what you have swept under the carpet. You can no longer try to please. There is a point at which you can no longer avoid, procrastinate, or drag out, and you have to attend to what needs to be attended to.

There is that which is not worth mentioning. And there is that which must be mentioned.

You have a choice every day over what you are going to allow to bother you. You do not have to let everything bother you. Some bothers are like gnats. Annoying. There are plenty of those, but they are not worth the time of day. Some bothers are innocent bees that buzz around but will not bite. You can go around them. And there are some bothers like huge flies, and you have to deal with them.

Sometimes there is someone who would step on your toes, over step, take advantage, go too far, and you have to call a halt. This does not mean you make anyone into an enemy. The one who overstepped is a simple soul who wants to wrest from life all he can. He is someone who craves more love, craves more proof of love to the extent that he will usurp. Whether he faces this or not is up to him. Whether you face it or not is up to you.

Certainly, there are many situations, even trespasses, that will go away all by themselves. And yet there are others where you are left with the feeling that you compromised yourself where compromise did not serve, that you were perhaps complicit in an offense against your own integrity and perhaps that of another.

The one who gets away with too much has a corner of awareness socked away that tells him he stole something and, and after the initial sense of victory, the getting away with it doesn’t feel good. And you were his abettor. And so he starts pretending as well. In truth, he will not like it that you submitted. And you will know you did not do him a favor.

When it is essential to turn around and confront, you do not have to slay the one you confront. You do not have to destroy him. You simply have to state how it is. No more than that. You don’t have to convince him. You have to state what you see and how far you cannot go. Some things are up to you, beloveds. You can do this clearly with love.

I keep saying him. You too have on occasion been the one who stepped over into someone else’s territory. You brazened through, or you bullied, or, at the moment, you were convinced that it was your right and you were not imposing. Be neither an imposer nor the one imposed. Be not the pickpocket with sleight of hand nor the one who allows his pocket to be picked.

Beloveds, what I am saying is that somewhere, sooner or later, you have to draw a line. And you have to know where to draw it. You have to determine what is big and what is little, what is offense to integrity or what is only an offense to pride. As in a game of poker, you have to determine when you are going to call, or when you are going to fold. Different from poker, you decide not so that you can win, but so that you can continue to play in good faith.