Keeping in Step: Peace

"The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. " Romans 8:6

I have always been enamored with people who seem to handle life with a sort of calmness.  Those people who cannot be moved.  They simply face life as if it were under their control, even when it is clear it is not. Those people who never seem to respond irrationally.  They don't have to stop and get their resolve - they never lose it.  

I recognize that some of those people are liars.  When they go home to their wife and kids, they are simply a tyrant.  Stalin and Mao have nothing on them.  They may treat the higher wagers with dignity and regard, but the hourlies are a dime a dozen.  I know this and I am not speaking of them.  

For the past several years, my wife has been attending a week long camp in the summer that is committed to taking 40-50 kids under the age of 12 and treating them like royalty.  These kids know very little about being treated as anything more than expendable.  Their history reads like a horror novel.  The shards of life that sometimes show up at camp are more than a person can bear.  If you can muster up the strength during the day to just be present with the kids, you typically bottom out in the late hours of the evening when you have to recognize the living Hell some of these kids face every day of their lives.

And sometimes - that Hell comes to life in front of you. 

These children who have have learned to protect themselves at any cost, fight back against the kindness.  The scars of "love" borne in their own body and psyche, reacts violently against the Love  has come to rain on their parched landscape.  The target of their resistance:  the counselors who have come alongside of them for the week.  The ones who are trying to show them that life doesn't not have to be a tragedy are the ones who get to see the tragedy unfold.  Amidst a torrent of emotions, these counselors stand like the Survivor Tree waiting for the storm to pass so that some type of shade can again be granted to the tired and weary.  

It's not that these people are superhuman or have no threshold for exhaustion. Everyone does and for some of them they would like the hurricane to cease.  However, their peace is what so many need.   They are like the physician from Thorton Wilder's play "The Angel that Troubled the Waters." Based loosely on John 5 and the account of the man at the pool of Bethesda, a number of invalids await the stirring of the water by an Angel.  A physician approaches whose problems are not physical, but emotional. Longing to be healed of his own infirmity, he approaches the water. However, the Angel tells him that the healing is not for him.  Instead, he (the physician) is the one who should be healing others.  Broken internally, the physician pleads with the Angel to heal him, but the Angel responds:

"Without your wound where would your power be?  It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men.  The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.  In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.  Draw back."

This is the secret for those who have Peace.

You see they many of them are at peace in their lives and being at peace means they can give that peace back. Sometimes that peace is a sense of wholeness - the Shalom of God.  Other times that peace is simply the assurance that life is what it is and there will be a day when all things are reconciled - that day may be today and I may be the bearer of that peace.  Other times that peace is just the steady calmness to accept that while life is filled with tragedy, there is hope.  Because only those who have been broken, know the healing power of Peace.  

Soli Deo Gloria