Bible

The Gift of Peace

So much of what I regard as peace is actually just an outcome.

Stephanie Phillips / 11.16.22

This reflection originally appeared in Daily Grace: The Mockingbird Devotional, Vol. 2:

Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace —
in peace because they trust in you. (Isaiah 26:3)

As an anxiety sufferer, my struggles have run the gamut from conventional worry to throat-constricting breathlessness, and I have always been confounded by Bible verses about “peace.” To me, peace was a promised-yet- unattainable gift, a virtue bequeathed but never fully realized. At some point, I had to accept that this could be a situation like the one voiced by Inigo Montoya to Vizzini in The Princess Bride: I kept using that word, but it might not mean what I thought it meant.

Francis Frangipane said that “rescue is the constant pattern of God’s activity,” and we see this principle at play throughout the life of Jesus, from his calming of the waves, to his death on the cross. We also see this in the Old Testament, when the Israelites cross the Red Sea, and Daniel is rescued from the lions, and Jonah is vomited from the whale. All of these stories are ready-made for Sunday school and victorious retellings, but we are more comfortable with the endpoint — smooth water, dry land — than we are the period just before.

I would argue that “the period before” constitutes the bulk of our lives.

Some translations of this verse from Isaiah call the peace God gives perfect, and Jesus himself says in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives,” implying a difference between how the Almighty regards peace and how the rest of creation does. If the peace Jesus gives is perfect, then it seems to me that the peace he gives must be himself.

So much of what I regard as peace is actually just an outcome: a specific form of rescue, a wish granted, a prayer answered with “Sure! What a great idea! I will give you that dream house!” And specific outcomes can be all too easily tied to my own efforts in attaining them. But rescue, like being born, takes no input from me — I am lost at sea, in the darkness of the whale, in the fire of the furnace. Rescue is accomplished for me.

This is why true peace can only be a gift, and why it ultimately amounts to the presence of Jesus with us in “the period before” — and every one after. True peace transcends feelings like settledness or nervousness. It sits beside us, it carries us, it rescues us by being with us. And it never, ever leaves.