I rest next to my wife while aware of God’s peace. I watch her sleep soundly while children’s voices and the activity at our mission station continue unabated. We receive person after person around our little table to love them, and His peace is evident each time. We wake in the morning with His peace. (2019)
I have been through deep grief and found His peace was present. (2016)
His peace remained as I released goals and dreams to tend and love my late wife through five cancers before God took her home. Hard times and good times marked that period in my history, but His peace was still present — in her as well as me.
But there was a day I knew no peace. I tried to find it. It was not in things. It was not even in the people around me at a live-in house full of college kids. It was not in various religions. I studied them and dabbled in a couple. It was decades ago, but I have not forgotten. It was not in relationships, though they surrounded me. I tried those, too. There was no inner peace within those things that was evident.
When I came to Jesus Christ in the 1970s, it changed. He put peace within. My testimony is simple: if you reach out and find Christ, He provides a peace that the world cannot provide. That peace can take you anywhere.
Meanwhile the clamor for peace continues. People fighting to obtain peace abound, but the fight is always about their own ideas of what it is. Whenever we set the rules, peace becomes elusive. The more radical people become to obtain things or position or power or recognition or pleasures without bound, the more elusive peace becomes. The more they control things and demand doing things their way will solve the remaining problems, the harder they seem to become. Peace takes flight.
He remains steadfast saying, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” John 14:27
Or this one…. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:6-7
The Author, Creator, and Sustainer of the universe (Hebrews 1:1-3) has not changed His direction or intent to have a people for Himself. For those who want to reach to Him, He can be found. For those who wish to live by their own rules, their own wisdom, and their own peace, He remains elusive and the wonder of abiding peace remains foreign.
Choose wisely. Reach for Him. After nearly 70 years, I find Him to be the source of peace that the world cannot provide.
