A Trembling Peace
“If a trembling hand causes us to trust You more then allow our hands to tremble.” Steve Brown.
“He Himself is our Peace…” The Apostle Paul, speaking of Jesus. Ephesians 2:13
It’s the morning after a really anxious night. It felt like every daemon I’ve ever battled had conspired against me. Nothing makes sense and nothing in my life seems to be working. Nothing.
The graveyard shift was ending as I sat in a chair waiting for the light to dawn. I determined to talk to Jesus about all of the craziness and what it all meant. I felt like I needed answers – how could I feel so lost?
I’ve had some pretty powerful experiences through listening prayer, where you actually talk/pray to Jesus as if he is sitting right there next to you. I don’t get much in the way of verbal responses, normally just pictures and images.
After my nightlong losing battle with the darkness, I didn’t expect anything but silence this morning. But, all of a sudden I saw Him. He was sitting beside me on the couch, in the midst of my anxiety and fear but he wasn’t nervous at all.
Whereas, in my world, nothing was going as I wanted it to and I wasn’t who I thought I should be, it seemed that in His world, everything was good, really good, and going in the right direction. I wanted to live in His world to be with Him where love and peace reigned supreme.
I then remembered Him appearing to me in a childhood memory. I was curled up in a ball in the cot I used to sleep in at the foot of my parents bed – I was four years old or so. I could hear angry voices and yelling in the background. One of my older, adolescent siblings had come home way past curfew and, apparently, drunk. There was fighting and screaming, and to my four year old heart, it felt like the very gates of hell were encroaching on my little world. I lay there in that cot, terribly scared, and incredibly alone. In my return to the memory, I could see the Lord Jesus lying beside me, on his side, so he could look directly at me and with his arm across my chest. I said to him, “I wish they would stop.” And he simply replied, “Me, too.”
“Me, too,” the essence of empathy and connection. “Your pain is my pain, too…”
He didn’t miraculously make the storm go away. But he gave me the gift of seeing that he was with me all along.
“My peace, I give you, my peace I leave with you. Not as the world gives it do I give it to you…” John 14:6
I find that what I most often pray for is the kind of peace that the world gives. The kind of peace that is challenge-less, storm-less, and painless. The peace that the world gives looks like magic. It is borne out of dumb luck, or the triumph or our own plans over the plans of others. I don’t think Jesus answers that prayer very often.
The more I see of Him, the more I realize that the prayer for the kind of Peace Jesus promises us is the kind where He shows up in the midst of our storms, the furnaces in which you are sure you are going to die. What He gives you is Himself and a new spiritual presence that makes your soul and the love and peace that sustains you, storm proof. He gives a hope rooted in Him that cannot, finally, disappoint.
“He himself is our peace…” His presence, his empathy, his love and his full and final power, is our peace. It’s the kind of peace that is borne out of the soul-deep conviction that love will finally win, despite all hell breaking loose. It’s a peace that is grounded in His own battle against the pain of our lives.
The reality is that we still live in a world shrouded in darkness and it’s really easy for me to lose sight of Him. Night terrors still seem to come out of nowhere and I never know if my circumstances are gonna get worse before they get better. But, the more I live and move and breathe and have my being in His world, the less the storms scare me.
He is our peace. The peaceful, powerful, loving and wise King Jesus is our Peace.
Take that, Darkness.
“He Himself is our Peace…” The Apostle Paul, speaking of Jesus. Ephesians 2:13
It’s the morning after a really anxious night. It felt like every daemon I’ve ever battled had conspired against me. Nothing makes sense and nothing in my life seems to be working. Nothing.
The graveyard shift was ending as I sat in a chair waiting for the light to dawn. I determined to talk to Jesus about all of the craziness and what it all meant. I felt like I needed answers – how could I feel so lost?
I’ve had some pretty powerful experiences through listening prayer, where you actually talk/pray to Jesus as if he is sitting right there next to you. I don’t get much in the way of verbal responses, normally just pictures and images.
After my nightlong losing battle with the darkness, I didn’t expect anything but silence this morning. But, all of a sudden I saw Him. He was sitting beside me on the couch, in the midst of my anxiety and fear but he wasn’t nervous at all.
Whereas, in my world, nothing was going as I wanted it to and I wasn’t who I thought I should be, it seemed that in His world, everything was good, really good, and going in the right direction. I wanted to live in His world to be with Him where love and peace reigned supreme.
I then remembered Him appearing to me in a childhood memory. I was curled up in a ball in the cot I used to sleep in at the foot of my parents bed – I was four years old or so. I could hear angry voices and yelling in the background. One of my older, adolescent siblings had come home way past curfew and, apparently, drunk. There was fighting and screaming, and to my four year old heart, it felt like the very gates of hell were encroaching on my little world. I lay there in that cot, terribly scared, and incredibly alone. In my return to the memory, I could see the Lord Jesus lying beside me, on his side, so he could look directly at me and with his arm across my chest. I said to him, “I wish they would stop.” And he simply replied, “Me, too.”
“Me, too,” the essence of empathy and connection. “Your pain is my pain, too…”
He didn’t miraculously make the storm go away. But he gave me the gift of seeing that he was with me all along.
“My peace, I give you, my peace I leave with you. Not as the world gives it do I give it to you…” John 14:6
I find that what I most often pray for is the kind of peace that the world gives. The kind of peace that is challenge-less, storm-less, and painless. The peace that the world gives looks like magic. It is borne out of dumb luck, or the triumph or our own plans over the plans of others. I don’t think Jesus answers that prayer very often.
The more I see of Him, the more I realize that the prayer for the kind of Peace Jesus promises us is the kind where He shows up in the midst of our storms, the furnaces in which you are sure you are going to die. What He gives you is Himself and a new spiritual presence that makes your soul and the love and peace that sustains you, storm proof. He gives a hope rooted in Him that cannot, finally, disappoint.
“He himself is our peace…” His presence, his empathy, his love and his full and final power, is our peace. It’s the kind of peace that is borne out of the soul-deep conviction that love will finally win, despite all hell breaking loose. It’s a peace that is grounded in His own battle against the pain of our lives.
The reality is that we still live in a world shrouded in darkness and it’s really easy for me to lose sight of Him. Night terrors still seem to come out of nowhere and I never know if my circumstances are gonna get worse before they get better. But, the more I live and move and breathe and have my being in His world, the less the storms scare me.
He is our peace. The peaceful, powerful, loving and wise King Jesus is our Peace.
Take that, Darkness.