Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful. ~John 14:27
This morning I woke with all the same worries I had just yesterday and throughout the last week and even further back than that. Yet, in these precious moments I am aware of a gift my Lord has given to me, how peaceful I feel about it all.To have pure peace from one infinitesimal moment to another is a precious thing, indeed. It is a breath, something unseen yet it sustains us. It is a gentle breeze, something moving us to feel its presence that we cannot touch. It is wind, subtly refreshing an entire landscape by influencing just one thing and then another. It is a moment, a precious moment.
For someone like myself, who tends to contemplate all possible downsides of every decision and situation, it is a surrendering of myself to the Originator of peace. When I pray, which is usually about things of which I have concerns, feeling peace seems to be recompensive.
However, this morning I was aware this peace before I began to address my Lord. It was a gift He gave me before I had thoughts about that which I would be worrying and when my worries came up, they seemed not to be worries at all. I am not indifferent to them, I am just not the entity of those worries--at least not for these precious moments.
So precious is peace....
So very precious....
Peace is not as fragile a thing as we imagine it to be. My Lord said "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you." He gave His own peace. It is an everlasting thing, stronger than any force we have known on earth or in the universe, yet it is a gentle as the breath of a sleeping baby. It is not that peace is so delicate, but the moment we allow ourselves to partake of it is.
Why do we both seek it and fear it? Why do we claim to want it and flee from it? We think that if we don't worry then we will not be prepared for what is to come. How can we prepare for things over which we have no control? Are those things not the ones we worry about the most?
I have been reading Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, a book to be savored. Each page is filled with such spiritual insight that it overwhelms and enchants me. I can neither put it down for good nor finish it. Dallas Willard writes about how we began living in the God's Kingdom the moment we accepted Christ and when we are in the Lord's will, we are being prepared to see His Kingdom more and so clearly that the death of the physical body will not seem like much more than walking through a opening between two rooms--probably not his exact words, but certainly his ideology.
We are all waiting to get to a peaceful place, heaven or the afterlife, but the point Professor Willard makes is that we are already in it.
That is how I felt this morning when I awoke, in His Kingdom with my Lord there just waiting for me to wake up. I have had a number of things on my mind and perhaps this was His gift to me so that I would remember that He is listening and that He has answered every prayer, so there is no need to worry further.
Perhaps I should not be concerned about such things at all and just enjoy these moments of peace as I partake in His Kingdom.
~ My Lord, if I could breath in Your peace, it would truly do far more than sustain me. Thank you for the glimpse of how it is to truly be living in Your Kingdom. Help me to see it more clearly and be in it more fully for it is truly a wonderful, peaceful place. ~
