Being an Ambassador ...

What does it make you think of? Foreign diplomats, flags, fancy buildings, multiple languages? Being an ambassador is a concept built into the Friendship Fixer program. For example, once children are taught how to resolve conflicts, they can more easily function as ambassadors to others; passing on the skills and tools and representing healthy friendships ... building bridges with each other. Can we agree that more "bridge building" is a good thing for our society? Here are a couple insightful descriptions of an ambassador I heard recently while listening to Tom Holladay, and I've added some of my correlating thoughts:

• Ambassadors live in a country not their own.
• When implementing Friendship Fixer techniques it may not feel familiar at first, but after time you become more comfortable with it, see the successes, and new habits emerge.
• Ambassadors represent the country they are from.
• When using Friendship Fixer techniques we represent the value and importance of healthy relationships to ourselves and to others around us. What a powerful example we have the opportunity to be!
• Ambassadors are on a temporary assignment, eventually they head back home.
• For those of us who believe life on this planet is not all there is, we understand that our time here is just practice for something much greater -- eternity. Another way to look at it is what kind of ambassador "legacy" will you leave here? Will you truly value friendships, healthy relationships, and seek to represent complete conflict resolution as ambassadors to others? Employing Friendship Fixer techniques is certainly one effective way to achieve this.
• Ambassadors always answer to a higher authority.
• Ah yes, all the "diplomatic immunity" in the world doesn't change the fact that there is ultimately one greater in authority over the ambassador. For those of us who believe in God as our higher authority, we can take comfort and encouragement in knowing that he loves us deeply, and desires reconciliation with us ... a forever friendship. Indeed, because he desires this with us he also compels us to be ambassadors of reconciliation with others ... to be friendship fixers.

Of course, there will be days we don't feel worthy to be an ambassador of healthy relationships -- we haven't treated others right, we haven't been treated right, there's unspoken tension in the way, etc. How do we keep going and doing what we know is right, being the "friendship fixers" we are called to be? We remember that we have the indescribable and humbling gift of being reconciled to God because of what Jesus did for us. First we focus on that, then we can more easily focus on right relationships with others around us.