Tuesday, January 5

Scripture: Isaiah 26:3
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.

PERFECT PEACE

Those are happy moments when we can say with certainty that this week was less hectic than last week. More often than not, we project our desire for peace into the future.  As soon as we finish this project we’ll get to rest. But when we finish that project, another one comes after it, and it’s surprisingly more demanding than we thought it would be. So we look forward to a break, but we fill it with all the things we haven’t had time to do. Or we—or someone we love—gets sick. Or we feel our loneliness more acutely. Maybe the holidays that just passed are not what you hoped they would be. They didn’t bring the desired peace.

When we zoom out of our lives and see the bigger picture of what is happening in the world around us, the possibility of peace becomes even dimmer. Tragedy after tragedy fills the news from country after country. We’re barely able to wrap our minds around one gross injustice before the media ignites with another mass killing. Our inability to stop to grieve with all of the victims, let alone help, points us back to the darkness in ourselves.

That’s when we need Isaiah’s words the most: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” Images of violence will flash before our eyes and worried thoughts will dart across our brains at night, but meditating on the unchanging God stills them. His great love for us, manifested in the gift of His son, calls us to trust His, even when we don’t understand or can’t see a way out. Trust takes our fractured attentions and splintered cares and brings us back to the One. It then allows us to take courageous action.

The music and video of Hillsong’s “Prince of Peace” expresses this experience for us. The song seems to start off in the middle of things by opening with soft repeated chords. The video matches this with black and white images of slowly moving waves and clouds. In each of the first two verses and the chorus, the lyrics narrates in the past tense the speaker’s movement from despair to hope through Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

In this calm and conclusiveness, a repeated note sounds in the background like a muted telegraph sending a message in Morse code. Static briefly interrupts the scene. Instead of fireworks, an explosion appears once and quickly fades away. Almost imperceptibly the music intensifies as the singer says, “You’re always there and You hear my prayer.” The lyrics change to present and future tense, color is introduced to the video and the rhythm takes on regular downbeats like a march. The images now represent the footage of violence with which we’ve become all too familiar, with flickers of heroism increasingly interspersed.

Yet we feel no real disjuncture with what came before it. We’ve already learned to read the disparate images as part of the whole. A return to the black and white images of waves at the end comes as no surprise. As the final scene fades, we sense a return to something we never really left.

It’s a picture of our lived experience, our daily and even hourly return to the God who is always there. He calls us into the peace he already created for us even as he calls us to be peacemakers.

PRAYER
Lord, may nothing disturb us,
and nothing frighten us
because we know
that all things are passing away
and You never change.
Help us to see how
patience obtains all things.
Help us to grasp
that whoever has You lacks nothing.
God, You alone suffice.

-- adapted from St. Teresa of Avila’s Bookmark

Monica Cure, Assistant Professor, Torrey Honors Institute