PEACE IN THE MOMENT
We Are Not OK - Part 1
Here we sit on the 8th day of Christmas and most of the world has moved on. Our calendar tells us that a more immediate holiday has arrived… New Years Day, 2020.
Yes, it’s a new year. Yes, it’s even a new decade.
We have resolutions to make and break. We have houses to clean. We have bank accounts to reconcile and credit cards to pay after Christmas. We have decorations to put away, assuming they have not already found their way into our basements and attics. And by now, school can’t start soon enough for most parents.
For some, Christmas ended the moment the last torn piece of wrapping paper hit the trash bag. Others oblige tradition, keeping the lights and tree up until Epiphany on January 6th, or at least the weekend before as we will do. But few of us truly know how to keep the 12 days of Christmas. The fullness of this Holy Season (after Advent) ends up in the return line like an unwanted gift while the stock crews replace leftover candy canes with heart shaped boxes of chocolate. Preachers tell stories about magi following a star while the rest of the world pressures us to move on and get life back to normal.
If I’m being honest, I’m not even sure what “normal” means anymore. The world feels like it’s in a tailspin. I’m not talking about the countless Chicken Little’s clamoring around under a falling sky. We can always find something to lament about the state of our society. The world is no better or worse than it has ever been. As one friend of mine says, “We ain’t changed a speck.” Thanks to modern technology, we merely see more than we did before.
In our world, “normal" life is filled with violence, pain, injustice, immorality and every form of chaos. We don't want more of what we have come to know as “normal.”
We all long for the same thing… PEACE.
The week before Christmas a manager at one of our favorite restaurants shared his love for being outside in the early morning moments of Christmas day. The family sleeps. The roads are quiet. Stillness settles over everything like the morning dew. As the poet Edmund Sears put it in 1849, “The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.” The only other time the world seems so peaceful, the manager said, comes the morning after a freshly fallen snow before the road crews begin plowing.
What have we done with the Prince of Peace whose birth we celebrate in such a rush?
“I’m glad it’s over,” I hear people say about Christmas. The chaos and busyness of the season has passed, followed by a sense of deep relief. But as we move into the new year, life does not slow down. In some ways “normal" life may be even busier than before.
As much as we love the peacefulness of an early Christmas morning or after a fresh fallen snow, those moments never seem to last. Often we do not pause long enough to notice them in the first place. The absence of peace, or our inability to take notice of it, leaves a much larger cloud looming over our world and it is a darkness of our own making.
Maybe the first step to finding peace requires admitting that our “normal" is not OK. The world is not OK. Life as we know it is not OK. We are not OK. And maybe for this moment, learning to be at peace with the pain and chaos of our reality, to be OK with not being OK, is the best thing we can do. Before we can calm the storm, we must be calm in the storm.
We’ll come back to that cloud of “Not Okay-ness” in the coming weeks, but for now, let us simply and intentionally carve out spaces and moments to experience peace.
Reflections:
Journal about one of the most peaceful moments you experienced in 2019. Give thanks for God’s grace in that moment.
What is one specific way you will carve out space to experience peace this week?
What is one specific way God can use you as an instrument of peace in someone’s life this week?