Second Sunday of Advent
From Wilshire Advent Devotions 2010
On the desk in our upstairs guest room is a framed poem that I wrote one summer while visiting my grandparents. Titled “Peace,” I typed it on my grandfather’s heavy, black, Underwood typewriter with the title word stamped into big block letters with asterisks.
With lines like “It’s in the beauty of the flowers, but not in war or Communist power,” the perspective is definitely 1960s. The evening news was full of the Vietnam War, racial unrest and political turmoil, and pop culture overflowed with songs and posters about peace. I was obviously mimicking what I saw and heard.
I was also presenting a child’s skin-deep view of peace. I was a kid growing up in a perfect family in a perfect suburb, with perfect friends at a perfect school and perfect church. At that age everything was external, and in my case, everything was good. I didn’t begin to understand the concept of “inner peace” – or the lack of it – until 1971 when my sister died from injuries after a car accident. A few months later I entered seventh grade with all its angst about self-perception, and the idealistic slogans about peace were forgotten.
It’s taken me years to understand that there is a type of peace that transcends all chaos. This peace can’t be typed onto a page. It can’t be bought, bartered, earned, stolen or won. It doesn’t come from a perfect life in a perfect world with a perfect body, because it’s not external. It comes with living from the inside out.
Sit still for a moment and consider everything that you can see, touch, taste and smell. None of that can ever bring lasting peace. Now consider your physical body. Prone to fatigue, misuse, injury and wearing out, there’s no peace there either. Now consider what is left: the mind, spirit, conscience, heart – what we collectively call “the soul.” It’s the place that God created especially for himself – to dwell within us. It’s the only place where we can know lasting peace.
I’ve known the peace that comes from this place. It’s not a feeling of “everything is the way I want it to be,” but rather, “God is with me, and I’m okay.” This peace is simple and straightforward, and yet it can be fleeting. I get busy and distracted and find that I’ve crowded God out of his place. The best way to prevent that is to spend more time in prayer and with the scriptures. Just as Jesus said, “I go and prepare a place for you,” I need to be vigilant in keeping a place prepared for him within me.
So what about the external peace that I typed onto that page in the 1960s? We can have that too. But it’s hard to “think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand,” as the song goes, until you first “put a little love in your heart.”
Lord, live within me now so that I may know your peace that lasts forever. Amen.