Isaiah 26: 3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.
Mama gave birth to me in the January cold and bundled me up on a Friday night for my first homecoming.
Daddy was no where to be found.
That is, until he brought the honky tonk band home from the bar to finish out their set in the kitchen at 3am. Because surely homecomings need beer and old school country music.
The first time mama ever told me that story, I laughed until I cried and then begged her to tell me every hilarious detail. It’s almost too good to be true. Or too outrageous to believe, depending on how you look at it. It’s still my favorite thing to tell people about my Daddy.
In the incarnation, God does something even more scandalous. He comes to the world in diapers, in the helpless form of a baby nursing at his mother’s breast. He comes weak and lowly and plain, just like every other human. He empties Himself of strength and power in order to serve and this lowliness teaches us something profound about how we find what we are looking for in this world.
C.S. Lewis says it best,
“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.
Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
We find what we are looking for when we finally stop looking to find it in this world. Peace & joy come from outside us—from the babe in the manger, the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Our father gives us a homecoming beyond our wildest dreams—a home in His tender care, and a lifelong feast of forgiveness, love, joy, and peace.
I’ve just finished reading Perfect Peace: in Imperfect Times by Dan Walsh. It was a birthday present from my colleagues and I’m lucky to have a Kindle version of it. Now, I’m planning to find reviews and book feedback and then will read here Linda Groff’s article Spirituality, Religion, Culture, and Peace: exploring the foundations for inner-outer peace in the twenty-first century.