Fourth Advent: Love and Peace

Are you scared about anything right now?

There are lots of things you could choose to be scared about. I don't need to list them.

Do I have my own list? Absolutely. I'm not engulfed in fear, but there are definitely moments when I think, "Ugh. I sure hope things work out okay because right now they don't look so great."

Do you want to know something fascinating though? Everyone has a different fear list. I imagine if most people listed their top 20 fears for the future there'd be significant overlap, but many people would list them in different orders and even judge other people for the order they'd chosen.

I was recently listening to someone talking about their fears, and later as I thought about it I had kind of a funny realization. "I think we're afraid of almost the exact opposite things." We had probably watched some of the same videos and seen the same graphs, and yet we came away with entirely different interpretations. We had read the same scriptures and seen totally different applications.

It reminded me of the internet phenomenon of nearly five years ago. Was the dress blue and black or green and gold? Was someone saying "Laurel" or "Yanny"? Goodness, even just last night I saw a picture of a pink and gray blanket someone's grandma had knitted. Only, all the comments were saying it was white and green. I had to hold my phone differently to see what they were talking about.

So yeah. We all see things differently. We all come into situations with different preconceived notions and core values.

And it's okay!!!

Just kidding. It's not okay! It's actually bad that we see things so differently. It's terrifying. It's frustrating. It greatly weakens us as a society.

But it is what it is. And I've been wondering how on earth we can manage to move forward with such fundamental differences.

An answer came to me during that conversation of various fears. The other person remarked, "What we need to remember is that Christ overcame the world."

I felt the truth of her words. Christ has overcome the world! He has overcome everything we are afraid of, all of the things on our disparate fear lists! And so while we might wish that our fear lists aligned better so we could tackle problems better, what really matters is that we realize that we alone cannot conquer our fears. It is only in Christ that we can find peace.

And His peace is available to everyone! We might not like the path someone else takes to Christ -- we may wonder how such a path could end up leading someone to Christ at all! But God knows what He is doing. He knows how to lead us to Him, how to help us surrender to Him instead of to our fears, how to help us realize that He's been encircling us in His love all along.

It is His love in us that makes it possible to love and forgive those who seem "other."  The more we learn to recognize and desire His love, the less we'll be tempted by the resentment and revenge-seeking that fear can create. We'll find that we now have space in our hearts to cultivate curiosity instead of contempt.

Of course, we won't do it perfectly, and neither will anyone else. No matter how hard we try, we might see contention even among people who follow Christ. We might see our fears realized.

But we can still trust that Christ has overcome the world. We can trust Him to be a source of peace even when the peace we'd prefer has been taken from us. And we can always hope that others find that peace too.

For, as the song says, "When there's no peace on earth, there is peace in Christ."