By George K. Werner
Peace is one of the most frequently spoken words in human history—and one of the least understood. We invoke it at the end of wars, at the signing of agreements, and in moments of exhaustion. We build institutions to keep it, boards to negotiate it, and missions to enforce it. Yet again and again, peace proves fragile. It arrives with ceremony and departs quietly.
Part of the problem is that we often use the word without understanding what it actually means.
Language offers a way back.
In Latin, the root of the English word peace is pax. Pax does not mean calm or silence. It means a pact, a settlement, an agreement. Its deeper root, pangere, means to bind, to fasten, to fix. From the beginning, peace in Latin thought was not passive. It was deliberate work—the conscious act of binding together what conflict had torn apart.
Peace, in this sense, was never automatic.
It had to be made.
But binding alone does not guarantee durability. You can bind something too quickly and watch it break again.
This is where the Kru language goes further—and deeper.
In Kru, peace is not merely ti-gba-gbeh. Peace is jloh ti-gba-gbeh.
To understand peace in Kru, one must begin with jloh.
Jloh means anger—not irritation, but force. Heat. Energy. Weight. And intriguingly, jloh also refers to the sun when pronounced as if it were rising. This is no accident. The language is teaching a subtle truth: the same force that gives life can also burn. Anger, like the sun, is not inherently evil. But unmanaged, it destroys.
Peace, therefore, is not the absence of jloh.
Peace is what is done with it.
The rest of the phrase tells us how.
Ti means time
Gba means to lock, to secure
Gbeh means a load, a burden carried
So jloh ti-gba-gbeh means, quite precisely:
In time, secure the burden of anger.
Peace, in Kru, is not silence.
It is not forgetting.
It is not pretending anger does not exist.
Peace is the disciplined act of, over time, securing a powerful burden so it does not spill, crush, or burn those who carry it.
This is a fundamentally different conception of peace.
Latin emphasizes binding after rupture.
Kru insists on timing, restraint, and emotional governance before binding can hold.
Latin asks: How do we put things back together?
Kru asks first: Is the weight of anger ready to be secured?
Together, they offer a complete theory.
History shows what happens when we ignore this sequence.
Empires imposed peace through force and called it order. The Roman Pax Romana stabilized territory but left resentment intact. Modern ceasefires freeze violence but often fail to address the anger beneath. Agreements are signed while grief is still raw, and the burden is locked too early—or ignored entirely.
The result is peace that looks solid but collapses under pressure.
Post-conflict societies that endure tend to follow the Kru logic, even if they do not name it. Liberia’s civil war ended with an agreement, but peace required time, truth-telling, acknowledgment, and restraint before reconciliation could hold. South Africa’s transition worked not simply because apartheid ended politically, but because anger was brought into the open and governed through moral reckoning.
Even in everyday life, we understand this instinctively.
Peace between husband and wife does not come from silence. It comes when anger is recognized as weight and handled with care. Peace between siblings does not require contracts; it requires time. Friendships endure not because conflict never occurs, but because resentment is secured before it spills into rupture.
In Liberian parlance, we say, “I want to sleep over it.” That is not avoidance. It is wisdom. It is the intuitive recognition of ti—time—before gba—locking anything down.
This understanding lives not only in language, but in faith.
One of my favorite moments in church comes at the end of worship, when the pastor raises his voice and says, “Nyeswa jloh-ti-gba-gbeh boh ni w’ṃ bo.” May God’s peace be with you. Sometimes it is rendered another way: “Na jloh-ti-gba-gbeh na saylah’ṃ bo.” My peace I leave with you.
Those words land differently when you understand what they carry. They are not a wish for quiet. They are not a promise of ease. They are a prayer that the burden of anger—jloh—will be handled rightly, that in time—ti—it will be secured—gba—so the load—gbeh—does not burn, spill, or destroy. It is a blessing of discipline, restraint, and wisdom.
In that benediction, Kru theology meets lived experience. Peace is not magic. It is work entrusted to us. It is the careful governance of powerful emotion. It is the courage to wait, to acknowledge, to restrain, and to carry what must be carried without passing the weight on to others.
Latin tells us peace binds what has been broken.
Kru reminds us that before binding, anger must be governed.
Faith asks us to practice both.
So when we say “peace be with you,” we are not asking for silence. We are asking for the strength to manage what could otherwise destroy us. We are asking for jloh ti-gba-gbeh—peace that holds because it has been handled with care.
And that, perhaps, is the deepest meaning of peace:
not the absence of conflict,
but the presence of restraint, wisdom, and grace—
carried with us,
and left with one another.
