In Pursuit of Peace

I began desperately asking God to teach me this principle of living easy and light He started to guide me through word searches in the scripture.  As I was looking at scriptures about peace, my heart stopped when I read the last part of Psalm 34:14: “Seek peace and pursue it.”

 

So simple it sounded…but how do you pursue peace? What does that even mean?

 

So at the end of last year I was walking around the sad little 70% off After-Christmas section “pursuing” cheap gift bags for the following year, when amid the bright Santas and decapitated snowmen and randomly orphaned ornaments a silver-glitter-edged, white wooden cutout stood eye-level with me. PEACE. That’s all it said. I walked past it the first time but I kept being drawn back to it. PEACE. It was like an invitation. And a question…How many times do I pursue cheap things instead of peace? I picked it up and assessed for a minute if what I was thinking was a result of the coffee I had obviously overdosed on or if this was actually a good idea. Yes, I will put it on my mantle…ALL YEAR LONG.  I brought it home and my husband made THAT face, you know the one he makes when I have done something ridiculous, but he thinks I’m cute anyway. So I unceremoniously shrugged and stuck the word PEACE up on my mantle and left it there.

My children, more observant than usual because they were practiced from looking for the elf on the shelf all December, saw the word right away and asked “Why is THAT up there?”  I told them that it’s because I have been praying for our house to be a place of peace and I put it up there to remind us.

After the garland came down.  After the house had returned to its “normal” state of…meh—it stayed. This one little sparkly word that sometimes taunted and teased me, sometimes anchored me, was becoming a part of our family’s pursuit.

The children would bicker and I would say “See that word on the mantle? What does that say?”

“PEACE.”

Sometimes even, I only had to point to the mantle and they would stop fussing (sometimes not). Pretty soon they started catching themselves and saying to each other with wagging fingers and a chiding tone, “See that word on the mantle? What does that say? PEACE (with a little air of condemnation). That’s what Mama wants.”

 

Who says you can’t buy peace?

I’m here to say you can…for $3 at Target after Christmas.

 

Seek peace. And pursue it.

 

That’s what David wrote while He was being pursued and oppressed by King Saul. When there was no place to rest. I love shows that depict police chasing the bad guys…you know how they always say into their radios “I’m in pursuit of a suspect…” We should run after peace this way.  Pursuit like how I run after so many things—like what God does to us.

 

David was seeking and praying for His own peace, communal peace, health, safety, and well-being— the end of the pursuit. He was tired and seeking rest and restoration of relationship so he could show his face again in public without fear for his life!  In fact, the warrior who killed Goliath and thousands of others in battle, eventually would move his capital to Jerusalem, an ancient city whose very name came to mean shalom “peace,” where peace was made possible in his Jerusalem by David’s conquering of the Philistine and Jebusite army.

 

What are you pursuing in your life right now?

 

If we want to live “easy and light,” we need to learn to seek peace and pursue it.

But when Jesus came into our world, He had a way of seeing right through people’s reputations and words—our modus operandi, our big talk and our small talk, and He saw our burdens, our hurts, our scars, our fears. He knew that shalom of community is not possible without first restoring relationship and having “peace” with God, and so he offers us the one necessary thing to meet our most crucial need—peace through His life. He humbled himself and became our shepherd servant, our sacrifice, our provider, our living water, our resurrection, our healing, our hope, our burden bearer, and yes, our peace.

 

Isaiah 53:5 “The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

 

HE took the punishment that brought us peace. He is the one who made peace possible. Before that, it was just a dream, a distant memory of a barely remembered past in a garden, where we last had peace with God. He brought us back.

 

When we pursue Jesus, it is a pursuit of peace.

When we pursue peace, it is a pursuit of Jesus.

 

He is our peace. For all of us who need peace with God, and peace in our storms, and peace within our families, Jesus is who we need to be pursuing. But how do we do that? I mean really? What does it mean to seek Him out?

 

Seek peace. And pursue it.

Seek Jesus. And pursue Him.