Stories like this over the last few weeks have left me feeling confused; it’s hard to understand how peace can be decided so remotely from the people it concerns. On Sunday suicide bombings in Damascus and Homs killed 140 people. How can these both be versions of the same story? Reconciling all the different versions of reality seems almost as out of reach as reconciliation between all the people involved in perpetuating the conflict.

One thing that is clear is the impact that the conflict continues to have in people’s lives in the meantime. A friend who lived in Homs recently shared the shocking recent drone footage of the extent of the destruction of his city, with these words:

“Wondering for how long I will be still able to remember you my lovely home city “Homs” the way you used to be. It will always be hard to believe what I see in this video. Goodbye Homs. I truly loved everything about you.”

This week I sat in a tent in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley with a family who fled their homes in Aleppo at the start of the conflict five years ago.

One of the women smiled as she told us,

“We laugh at ourselves because we used to see people living in tents on the news, refugees from Yemen or Iraq – and now we have become those people.”

I was reminded of how easily that could be me, or any one of us; and equally how easily fear, the way stories are presented to us in the media, and our distance, allow us to see them as people that could never be us.

I know that I’m unusually lucky to have had this opportunity to connect with some of the people behind the story – to drink sweet Syrian tea together and to share stories about our families, to laugh and to watch children play. But in the UK, and even in my comfortable life in Lebanon, I usually feel very far removed from the people at the heart of this story I care deeply about.

This idea of being disconnected is something I’ve been thinking about recently in terms of my ‘two lives’ in the UK and in Lebanon. I still struggle with each transition, wanting to hold onto the people and the place I am leaving behind, often thinking of what I’m missing out on being part of with the people in the place where I’m not.

So, lately I’m trying to lose the fear of missing out – a lesson I learn by deliberately choosing in each moment to be present in the lives of the people I’m with. It could mean sharing tea with Syrians in the Bekaa Valley, it might look like enjoying breakfast with my housemate in Oxford, or it might be finding a way to practically encourage someone who is deeply engaged in meeting the needs of the people who are on my heart.

I have a feeling that peace on a bigger scale also has something to do with connecting; finding ways to know the people who are actually very often living lives not so different to ours – wanting to find work, to do the best for their children, to be safe. I love my work in Lebanon because I get the chance to, in small ways, be alongside people who are deeply committed to and connected with with the Syrian families they are serving, and I love that I get the chance to share these stories with you.

On the day I visited the family from Aleppo, I also visited a new project we have started which is providing catch-up education for children right there amongst the tents they are living in. I saw a classroom full of children eager to learn, and a Syrian teacher who (despite the difficulties of managing the behaviour of children who have been out of school for several years) shone with something that looked a lot like peace as he spoke about his sense that what he is doing is something really important; and I believe it is.

Maybe there will be peace in Syria this weekend. Maybe there won’t. But right now we can choose to be present and be connected where we are with the people around us. And we can also choose to find ways to connect with and listen to the stories of the many people who, unnoticed, beneath the surface, are quietly building peace; a  peace that I suspect may have more impact that we can understand.

‘The future is not                                                                                                                 somewhere else but here and now:                                                                                    sunlight, rain dancing.

Stop trying to prove                                                                                                                  yourself; become a swallow                                                                                                               in flight; blur of joy.

Change in Syria                                                                                                                                       or the next Syria starts                                                                                                                   here: with me, with you.’

(From ‘Unfurling’ by Ian Adams)