December 3, 2009
It is barely three weeks until Christmas. I have had my usual overwhelmed breakdown moments. With magazine deadlines, the normal Christmas fanfare and a few extra events here and there, I have been part Grinch and part Scrooge – feeling at times like the tears were so close to the surface that I might cry in the line at the dry cleaners or the grocery store. Do you have moments or maybe whole seasons of life when you feel that way? It is pretty telling when the Christian magazine lady gets really bent out of shape over the whole celebration of Jesus’ birth. Anyone reading this is probably aghast.
But I am writing this blog anyway. I have stopped being surprised by my depravity or my sin. As though I am in a stage play, I can put on my best “Christian” smile and speak my best “Christianese” while the person inside my heart is someone else altogether. I feel better already by just confessing that to you.
Yesterday afternoon I did something I haven’t done lately. I delivered magazines. When I began publishing six years ago, delivery was one of my regular duties, but over time I have been blessed to hire others to do that for me. This month we were pressed to get them out quickly and it was necessary for all of us to pitch in.
The temperature was hovering around 40 degrees, and I popped in a CD mix of Christmas favorites a friend had given me. And then something really special happened. The words to Sandy Patty’s Child of Peace wrapped themselves around my heart and good tears – happy tears – began to flow.
There was something about the lyrics and the description of peace that brought me out of the haze I seemed to have been living in lately. In a world where the news is so often about war – the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, etc. we think of peace in just one context - as the absence of weapons and the visible devastation we see constantly on the evening news.
But the peace I was reminded of yesterday in the words of that song was a different peace. It was a yearning, longing, soul-filled sense that words can’t describe, but my heart called to remembrance. The peace of Christ…His peace in me.
“Peace I leave with you…my peace I give you…” John 14:27
