Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Peace is forever sought and elusive. The writer of today’s Psalm of Ascents for
those travelling to Jerusalem’s temple, understood the anguish of one living far
from home. And the distance was not in
miles or travel days, but attitude. “Home”
(as the poet has it) is where the heart is.
The heart of this writer longed for kindness and strength of trusted
relationships. You can almost feel his
bones creaking for the absence of peace.
He brings forth his words from a tired heart that aches for the renewing
of truth, an honest moment of unguarded rest.
The sentence that stands alone in this Psalm is I searched
for peace, but they wanted war! As
the exhaustive climb to the apex of life’s mountain of experiences comes to a
close, this aging prophet looks back at life and the vanity of all else but
peace; his stand-out takeaway-line is anger.
He craved a soft, refreshing water of calm truth to restore his dusty
soul; what he got was a mirage of an amusement park’s diversion…success offered
on the backs of the poor and lonely. So-called
peace was bought with bloodstains on every road.
The Psalm begins with assertion that God heard and
answered his cry for rescue from the peace-barren, angry foreign place! So, how is the prayer of the writer’s troubles
answered? This is a good question, and
one which the eons of humanity find sparse answer. That is – there is sparse answer without the
leap of faith.
There is a tendency toward thinking too much in the here
and now, as opposed to the eternal.
Peace (in this life…at the address you call “home”) is measured in
fleeting moments of satisfaction with circumstances. The key word is fleeting. That word is key, because the heart longs deeply
for peace that is eternal.
Considering the track record of humankind, from the moment Eve took the
first unsatisfactory bite of the fruit that separated her from God’s loving
embrace, to the sharing of it with Adam, and then passing it along to Cain, and
the rest of every breathing being, staining with curse every part of our
existence right down to this present moment, we can have little hope in the maneuverings
of human cleverness to somehow produce anything close to peace.
Much more likely is the scenario of Russia invading
Ukraine, and then America retaliating, followed by some sort of “peace-response”
of the United Nations, followed by decades of tension-filled negotiations,
incidents, and exposed treachery on all sides.
Man longs for peace, but it’s an illusion, because the blood-stained
road of war is more “profitable.”
For You Today
It is a short-leap
from the history books to despair. The one
antidote for such misery is embracing it the way God did. He sent his only begotten, beloved son, Jesus
to deal with our problem. In true
fashion, we nailed the Prince of Peace to a tree on the town garbage dump. And that’s when the olive branch of peace
appeared…in the wonder of an empty tomb!
So…go on in…look
around that empty tomb; see the folded death shroud…feel the empty space death
was supposed to inhabit…and know that peace lives forever in the beating,
resurrected life of our Savior. And he
wants you to have it. You only need
drink…deeply!
You chew on that as
you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
[1] Title and other images: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
