Hello everybody,
welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are kicking off
this week something brand new for the podcast and we’re doing what we’re
calling a mini-series.
What that means is instead of a more long-form discussion
that will cross, you know, a month or more,
this is going to be a series of two conversations,
just two weeks, this week and then the next.
And the point of this
is a little bit for two purposes.
One, we’re in preparation for some things
that we’re going to be doing in the Lenten season that we’re really excited
about and this will be a bridge that gets us into that.
And the other is we
were reflecting on things that have been in our common experience over the course
of the last months and year.
And you know, we really landed on this idea that
on some level, we’ve all been touched by the realities of anxiety and fear and struggle.
And on some level,
as people of faith,
we’ve all been seeking to
chart a path into what we are called to be as people of peace.
And so that’s where we’ve landed on our conversation today.
It’s going to be a little bit
more reflective than some of the conversations that we’ve been having in
the Faith Fight series.
But we’re glad that you’re here and hope that in this
time that we spend together,
that there’s both some moment of self-awareness,
but maybe even a short time,
a short little sanctuary of peace in this conversation itself.
We’re glad that you’re joining us.
We think that this is a moment in which,
you know, we are all in a similar
circumstance in a way that isn’t often true.
You know, nationally, sometimes there are things that affect everyone at once,
but this is a global moment in
which there is anxiety in every corner of the world at some level.
There are people scattered throughout the world sort of worrying about the same kind of things—health,
the danger of the disease,
the disruption of economy and normal life,
the wrestling with the sort of loneliness and isolation that social
distancing has brought many people.
And these aren’t new realities at this
point.
We have been living into them for nearly a year now.
And so we wrestled a
little bit with why speak to this now.
But the reality is that peace is an
ongoing challenge for Christians,
both internally and externally.
It’s not something we’re ever done with.
And in the world we live in,
anxiety is a thing
that tends to be cyclical as well.
There will,
if we allow ourselves,
always be something to be worried about,
to be fearful of.
And I think surprisingly,
or maybe not surprisingly to you if you’re a person well acquainted with Scripture,
the Bible speaks deeply to this kind of human condition of worry.
And in both the
Old and New Testament,
we hear a strong call on multiple, multiple occasions,
“Do not be afraid.
Do not be anxious.
Do not worry.” We’re not the first people to
struggle with some of these issues.
No, that’s absolutely right.
And you know, I do think that we must recognize how different our experiences of anxiety can
be from one person to another.
Some people,
the struggle with peace is a deep
and continued reality.
Some people, just by nature of their character, their personality,
their engagement in the world,
they’re worried all of the time.
Peace is a constant struggle in their own faith journey.
Some people,
their orientation to the world is one in which they have a hard time sleeping at night.
One way that they love is by worrying.
They’re worried about their kids,
they’re worried about their spouse,
that there’s other people who their desire to live
faithfully in the world looks like worrying about choices and worrying about
what would happen if this happens.
And so for those people,
you know, this conversation has a very real,
maybe even kind of a stinging effect to come back
to that reality and to look at that.
It could be very difficult.
And I think there’s other people though,
and for me I think this is the boat that we can all find ourselves in,
is we’ve all been affected by the realities of the world
in which we live.
I wonder if you’ve ever read a really good book and as you’ve been reading,
you find yourself sort of talking and thinking like some of the
characters in that book.
Rochelle and I joke about this sometimes when you’re
reading a detective novel,
suddenly you’re finding mysteries all around you
that you never did.
And then in a couple weeks after you’ve done with that book,
you enjoyed it, but you don’t wear that lens like you did before and you kind of
don’t see the world in some of the categories that you saw it for that short time.
I think the danger of living in the highly anxious oppositional moment
in which we have lived for months now is that we might have taken on this lens of
anxiety and worry and maybe even fear and we’ve not really recognized the
extent to which it’s shaping our perspective and view of the world.
I wonder if we’re carrying worry into some of our relationships,
some of our decisions,
into some of our own faith encounters in a way that we haven’t
identified because it’s been subtle,
because it’s grown and it’s built up as
time has gone on.
And there’s a sense in which I think many of us find ourselves
sort of medicating or not focusing on the things that give us worry because
quite frankly we’re just trying to get through this day,
trying to get through
this month, trying to get through the challenges that have laid before us.
And so I do think there’s deep wisdom in returning to Scripture,
which not to sound callous, but Scripture doesn’t care about the exact conditions of our present moment.
Scripture has been carried through generations of those who
have struggled, those who’ve gone through wars,
rumors of wars, pandemics,
right?
That Scripture speaks to a timeless, loving, creative God.
And as we turn to that, it has a way of helping show us some of the blinders that we
might have taken on in some of this time.
Yeah, the Bible wouldn’t know a word
like pandemic, but it uses words like famine,
drought,
war,
pestilence,
sickness.
There have always been challenges and struggles in the history of human beings,
and those struggles have always caused fear.
They have always caused
anxiety and worry.
And I think on the front end it’s important to identify
that when the Bible calls to peace,
it is not denial.
This is really important.
There are those who don’t worry,
but they largely don’t worry because they don’t
face the reality of the situation.
They simply ignore or compartmentalize
anything.
So not facing the struggles of the world is not peace, biblically speaking,
that I can live sort of neglectfully through my own life
without really considering what’s out there that could do harm or could happen
to me or my loved ones.
That’s not peace, biblically speaking.
Peace is a confidence that faces the realities of life and refuses to worry about them,
or in fact doesn’t, maybe a better way to say this,
doesn’t feel the need to worry
about them because of the faith and trust put in the God of the universe.
And so it is a very different thing when the Scripture says,
“Be at peace,” it doesn’t mean,
“Oh, I’m just not going to think about that.
I’m just not going to
face that.
I’m not going to worry about that by avoiding it.” It is not
avoidance, biblically speaking, and I think because Americans tend to confuse
those words, or at least those practices,
I think it’s really important that we
start with understanding the Bible does call us to face reality,
just not to do it fearfully.
Yeah, and I think we have to,
as we look at the larger scriptural
witness, we have to start from that place that you mentioned,
Clint.
We have to recognize that peace always integrates our inner life with external reality.
We can never look at peace and let it be dumbed down when we come to the faith understanding of peace.
Peace in our inner self,
that awareness of God making
us whole is good and important,
but that’s never the end in Scripture.
Scripture speaks poignantly and explicitly about peace that’s worked out in the world.
Peace between nations,
peace between enemies,
the cessation of hostilities is a real outcoming or product that comes from peace worked by
God.
So we can’t let the spiritual versus the physical,
the personal versus the
external.
We can’t let these things separate in the scriptural understanding of peace.
Peace and wholeness exists for all.
God intends it for all of creation,
not just our own inner experience.
And so I think that’s
important, Clint, to recognize that this is a larger conversation and it’s in a
larger command when we’re told fear not.
God’s not just talking about,
you know, don’t shake in your boots.
This is a much larger concept and it should,
as people of faith,
be an invitation to a much longer journey than just trying to
sort of change our emotions in a moment.
If we think back to the creation
narrative, we realize that one of the byproducts of God being God is
tranquility.
In other words, one of God’s inherent designs for people and the creation is stability,
is order,
is peace,
is stillness.
And we see that
reflected in the Genesis stories,
you know, and what we learn as the story
unfolds is that sin is then the enemy of peace.
Peace is the intention that God
has for the world and the people in it,
but sin is that which comes and disrupts peace,
both internally and externally.
And when we encounter the word peace in the Bible,
Michael, you’re exactly right, it’s just, it’s a huge word because it
means my own calmness,
my own sense of stability and tranquility,
but then it’s also the promise of global peace,
of national peace, of international peace, that the promise of God is that one day there will be peace,
not just that people
will be at peace internally,
but there will be peace.
It is the desired outcome
and it is the inevitable outcome of God’s plan being fulfilled,
that peace is inherent to what God wants for his people and for his creation.
And that makes it, I think,
bigger than we often reflect on it.
And it is more distinct
when you look at it from a faith perspective than what we might give it
credit for.
Clint, what you just said may sound to us like elementary.
Well yeah, obviously God wants peace,
but that’s because it’s integrated so thoroughly in
our understanding of what it means to be people of faith.
To give you a contrast,
just for a moment,
think about for a second the Greek mythologies and the
gods that are capricious,
that are all politically working against each other,
manipulating even in some cases human choices and human moments to move their agenda forward.
The Greeks imagined gods that were constantly at war,
they were trying to best one another,
they were trying to disrupt so that they could
create new advantages for themselves.
It’s the opposite of what we discover in
the revelation of God,
that God has no need to self-advantage.
God has no need
to acquire power.
In fact, when God encounters humans over and over and over
again, whether that be Moses or Abraham or later we have those encounters in the New Testament,
we find this imperative,
this command over and over again,
do not be afraid.
And yet here stands mortal humans before the presence of an
immortal creator, Almighty God.
There’s really no better situation to be afraid
than the one in which the finite meets the infinite.
And yet in every single one
of these encounters we find a generous,
an open, a loving,
and ultimately peace-calling God who says,
“I come here and you do not need to be afraid in my
presence.” And that reality,
Clint, which may unfortunately to some of us sound elementary,
is not elementary.
It is one of the fundamental building blocks of our
Christian faith that we can come to the throne of grace and we can do so without
terror because we know the character of the one who’s waiting for us there.
Yeah, I think the invitation that we have as Christians,
we understand that we have
been invited in Christ to approach God without fear,
that seeing the extent of
God’s love for us,
that He would in the,
you know, classic language, give His only begotten Son that whoever believed in Him would not perish,
that we have a
courage in that, a strength in that,
a belief in that,
that in the grace of
Christ we have nothing to fear from God.
And in the power of God we have
ultimately nothing to be afraid of,
though we are not immune from the
struggles of the world.
But we are given the antidote to fear in the presence of
faith, in the gift of belief and trust.
And those things,
faith and fear,
will always be within us in a sort of constant battle.
And the more that we feed one,
the less that the other one is able to speak to it.
And that’s true, it’s a balance beam.
Whichever we give our attention to,
that one is going to have a
stronger voice in our spirit and in our mind.
And, you know, if you are a person
who’s prone to worry,
if you are anxious,
if you have deeply struggled in these
moments where so much of life has been kind of outside of our control and our input,
then, you know, it sounds very trite to say,
“Well, you put your faith in God.”
It is not that easy,
friends.
It is a battle,
a daily battle, that has to be won,
not in a moment,
but over time, as we learn to lean into our faith.
And as we do,
as we are then able to
increasingly let some of our anxiety and our worry and maybe even our pessimism go,
that’s not something accomplished in a day.
It’s not something accomplished in a two-week podcast.
It is an invitation to remember that we are invited to this ongoing transformation
in which peace increasingly becomes the reality that we live with.
And that flows out of what you’ve already shared,
this idea that peace’s enemy is the
propagation of sin, that reality,
we discover fear and anxiety on the other side of putting ourselves before God,
making ourselves little gods,
as in the Genesis stories.
And, you know, I wonder what you would think about this,
Clint. I do think there’s a sense in which
when we fall into lives of anxiety,
when we allow that sort of rule of sin to rain in our hearts,
we begin to believe that the world is scarce,
that there’s not enough,
that ultimately we must
preserve for ourselves, we must acquire and we must hold.
We become very close-fisted
in our encounter with the world.
And that story that comes to my mind with this is Abraham and Lot.
You might remember this story where they are going together,
they survey the land and they’ve got to choose,
their flocks have gotten too big,
they’ve got to choose who’s going to go take this ground,
who’s going to go take this ground.
And, you know, in that moment there would be lots of
reason for both of these characters to not have peace.
I mean, ultimately it appears to them that
one place isn’t good for their flocks and the other place is.
That should be right with conflict,
who’s going to fight the other to get the good ground.
And if you lived in a world in which
there’s not enough, in which we have to continually be fighting for ourselves,
then there’s no way that peace could exist or rain in that moment.
Yet,
Abraham trusts God, that God has called them on to this journey and he says,
“Lot, you go take that ground,
God’s going to be faithful and it’s going to be okay.” And it turns out that God is faithful,
that there would have been no cause or reason for anxiety or fear because there was enough,
even though it didn’t
appear to them in that moment that there was.
And so I wonder if there’s not a sense in which
peace leads us to believe some things about ourselves and our world that are dangerous.
When we live with anxieties and fears,
we begin to believe that the world doesn’t have what we
need in it and we begin to lose trust and faith in the God who can care for us along the way.
Yeah, I think perhaps there are two ways that the Bible critiques anxiety.
The first is as a kind of
lack of faith.
The disciples are in the boat,
Jesus scolds them for worrying about the storm.
This is a fairly common refrain throughout the Bible,
that fear is in opposition to faith.
But there is a second voice,
maybe a quieter voice,
in which fear or anxiety is critiqued as
a waste of energy.
Jesus said, “If you worry, can you add a single day to your life?” In other words,
that fear is a misdirection of our gifts,
of attention,
of energy, of passion, of
some of our spirit.
And when we allocate it to worry,
we are essentially wasting our time because
we can’t, by worrying,
affect. We don’t have agency by worrying.
Instead,
we have been invited.
Really, the language would be we have been set free to take another path and invest our energy
in other places without worrying,
which is both in opposition to fear and a waste of our energy,
to some extent a waste of our time.
And there is a moment,
Michael, where this language, I think, gets messy,
gets intertwined.
I have visited with multiple people during this year who have said,
“God is in control.
If I get COVID,
if I get sick, if I die,
that’s up to God.” And on one hand,
that sounds like a deep statement of faith.
And I don’t want to say that it isn’t,
because I do think there is a tremendous freedom in saying,
“God is at work in the world,
and I refuse to be afraid.
God has everything in His hands.” The language we’d use,
and it’s troubling language, it’s hard to sort out,
but we would say,
“God is in control.” On the other hand,
what does a statement like that do?
It erases the idea that I have agency.
It erases the idea that
I have to make good decisions.
I should put on a seat belt.
I should take my medicine.
I should go to the doctor when I don’t feel well.
I shouldn’t take risks when I drive or when I,
you know, I should be cautious to some level and use good judgment.
And to simply say that
it doesn’t matter what I do,
because God had…
That there is faith in it,
but there’s also fatalism and determinism in it.
And those are not places where Christianity has decided to live.
We have instead generally said,
“We each of us have to navigate some of our life on our own.”
And yes, God is over it.
God is sovereign over our life,
but God has given us the ability
to manage some of the decisions on our own.
And I think, you know,
what does that do?
That creates moments for anxiety.
You’ve said numerous times,
Clint.
In fact, you mentioned it in a conversation
earlier today, that faith is not a switch,
but it’s a dial.
And I think that’s an incredibly
helpful image for us as we begin to lean in to some of this self-reflection.
Because the reality is,
as humans, we’re drawn to simple answers.
We’re drawn to simple frameworks that helps us make
sense of our world.
And that’s not something to judge ourselves for,
but rather something for
us to learn and continue to be engaged in.
And the reality is,
though it may feel more peaceful
to ignore the things happening around us,
that is not peace.
Though it may feel peaceful to just
find ourselves in a place where there’s not active conflict,
that doesn’t mean it’s a place of peace.
There’s been many people,
and there’s been many times in history in which we simply ignored the
circumstances around us, or we ignored the opposition underneath the surface.
And that, friends, is not what Scripture speaks of when it talks of peace.
In fact, there are many times in
Scripture where the idea is that we are called to work for peace,
which is very much this theme,
that we as the people of God need to have agency in the lives that we live.
And this does connect
to this idea that if we’ve been given grace in Jesus Christ,
if we’ve been raised with Christ,
then the new agency given to us,
not by our own merit.
And I need to be clear,
not by our own emotion.
This is significant.
It’s a gift given to us that we do practice,
that we lean into,
that we trust by the grace of God is there,
even when we may not feel it.
Some of the greatest
workers of peace in the world have been those who have dealt with significant fear and anxiety and
struggle within their own souls.
But yet God can work peace even in unbelievably difficult places.
And I think that’s maybe where we begin to sort of lean into this conversation of,
where do we analyze ourselves and our culture and our place in the world right now so that we can
ascertain how we can continue to grow in this area?
And one question might be,
are we as people
of faith taking seriously the world around us?
I think a question we would all do well to ask
is rooted, Clint, in that idea of are we avoiding or are we recognizing the struggles that surround
our lives and yet still finding peace even amidst those struggles?
If we found ourselves sort of
closing off parts of our hearts or parts of our souls and saying, you know what,
I’m going to lock
that closet and not go there,
that may feel like peace.
Though when put under the lens of faith,
we find it’s not peace,
we find it’s avoidance.
Yeah,
not to kick a hornet’s nest here, Michael,
but I think of the drama that we’ve seen over
the last year with the idea of wearing masks.
And all of us have someone in our life,
in our circle, who says, “I don’t wear a mask because I’m not afraid.” And I’ve been confronted with that idea
and really trying to do some soul searching.
Okay,
am I afraid of COVID?
And I think realistically,
if I’m being honest with myself and I think that I am,
while no one wants to get sick,
I’m not terribly afraid.
So I think many of us see a different way.
In other words, when we look through this lens of either fear or no fear,
there is another part that says,
“Look, if I have a mask on,
it’s because people that I think know what they’re talking about said
I might be less likely to get someone else sick.
I might be helpful to someone who’s more vulnerable
than I am.” And yet when we frame things through this afraid or not afraid, this simple binary
evaluation,
it really only complicates.
The idea is it simplifies it,
but it doesn’t.
It complicates it because Christians instinctively know there’s more to it than that.
And what I think that demands of each of us is exactly what you’re asking,
that we sit for a while with the question,
“Am I anxious?
Am I feeling fear?
And if so,
where is that fear based?
Is it in reality?
Is it in these possibilities that I spin for myself?
Is it in some sort of worst case scenario?
Is it a product of pessimism?
Have I been doing anything?
Have I been filling myself with anything
that would push back on anxiety?
Have I been praying?
Have I been reading?
Have I shut off
the news when it seems overwhelming?
Have I been able to do some things that help me regain a sense
of equilibrium?” Because this has been an anxiety-filled year,
not just the virus,
but our reaction to it, our division within it,
the political season that still continues to unfold.
We have the racial tension.
I feel like we have just had helping after helping after helping of something
we didn’t want to eat,
and we now find ourselves worried about all of it,
or we find ourselves
just shutting down and saying,
“I can’t take any more.
I can’t deal with it anymore.” And neither
of those is really the best option for Christians.
We may spend a little time on either pole as we
navigate life, but for the Christian,
that middle way of recognizing some of the complexity,
but refusing to give in to fear and be motivated and moved by anxiety is the right path.
It is the hardest path, but it is the best. I think that this is true,
especially in the New Testament,
though I think we could point to instances in the Old Testament.
But it’s striking to me that peace
rarely gets discussed by itself.
It often is accompanied by these other words of the faith,
things like grace and faith and hope and trust.
And I think that’s significant,
Clint,
because realistically as Christians,
we recognize the only way to live lives that
are punctuated by peace is to have these other things at work in our lives.
And I think what
is a struggle for all of us is that we get into these seasons in which the waters around us are
tainted by all of the fears and anxieties,
all these things that you’ve named.
And our temptation is
to simply shut down or push out the stuff that is beginning to trouble us.
We find in ourselves
moments and places that we can hide things.
And of course, there’s those things that we do,
or that we might know about ourselves that are unhealthy ways that we deal with things.
Maybe we have routines, habits, maybe even we might call some of them addictions that we turn to.
Those are things that need names.
And by the way,
those are worthy in times like this of finding
someone that you can talk to and engage those things seriously.
If you find yourself going
down an unhealthy road,
that we need to find the agency that we find in Christ by grace to address those things.
But I think we also find that grace is an invitation to hold these things
lightly and to be honest and humble with ourselves.
And this is what I mean by this.
When peace is surrounded by the other fruits of the spirit and God’s work in our life,
we can recognize
that even though our life may not be in this moment what we want and the conversations that
surround us are not comfortable,
even though we may have discovered some things about ourselves
or our world in this season that make us very uncomfortable.
As people who believe in grace,
we can recognize that God’s love is unconditional,
that God holds us regardless of any flaws or
failures we may have found.
That God in fact loves us even though we’ve continued to stubbornly
hold on to some of the fears and anxieties that God would like for us to let go.
God calls us in the New Testament.
Jesus says,
“Take my yoke, take my burden because it’s light.” And yet so
many of us stubbornly continue to refuse to give up the burdens that we carry.
And yet God’s grace
and love is true for us even while we do that.
The amazing love of God is something that we
struggle to allow to penetrate the walls of our souls.
And yet if we’re willing to do that, Clint,
then this topic of peace is no longer one that is sort of detached from reality.
It’s not just a conversation about ideas or ideals.
Rather, it can slowly become a reality in us if we allow
these larger constellations of scriptural hopes and promises to be true for us.
I think it’s helpful to remember that peace isn’t all or nothing and it’s not all at once.
Those who know me will know that I’ve struggled with patience virtually—not virtually—I’ve
struggled with patience my entire life.
And I used to pray often,
“Lord, give me patience,”
typically in a situation that I needed some and didn’t have any.
And I eventually
came to pray that prayer less because it seemed to me that when God received it,
what God heard was,
“Give me an opportunity to learn to be patient.” And I don’t want to learn
to be patient.
I want to have patience.
And I think the same is true of peace, right?
We think of peace as this present,
this wrapped gift that God is going to simply give us.
And the reality is,
when we ask for peace,
what will most often be the case is that we get an opportunity
to learn to be peaceful.
We get an opportunity to experience peace.
And if we wait to pursue
peace until the moments that we feel most anxious and have the least amount of peace internally,
it’s not going to be up for the task.
We will have typically not done enough to offset those moments.
And again, we live in a season in which there have been many of those moments.
And so, as we continue this conversation,
we will turn toward how we might incorporate peace,
how we might embody peace internally
and externally, because that’s the wonderful call of peacefulness
in the Scripture to be peace-filled,
but also to be a peacemaker.
It is very hard to do the second before the first.
Peace generally needs to be an internal reality before it can have an external
effect in my circle or in my community.
But it is something that there are tools.
Again, it is not mysticism.
It is leaning in to our relationship with Christ because ultimately,
that’s where peace is found.
It’s not a magic incantation.
It’s not a wand.
It’s not something
it’s not a necklace we wear or a protective amulet.
It is a byproduct of a relationship,
and that takes time and that takes effort.
And this is a season that has probably for most of
us at some point kind of drained our tank.
And so, the question of how it is that we find reserves
in regard to tranquility,
stillness,
and those beautiful descriptive words
that are translated “peace” I think is a worthwhile question. I think that that’s a really helpful transition both out of this conversation and into the world
that we’ll enter as we end this conversation together.
And that’s simply,
we do not intend
in two weeks, we’re calling this a mini-series,
we’re not in two weeks intending to make any
exhaustive statements about peace.
If anything,
these conversations are unbelievably short and
primer-ish in their intention.
And so, if you are going to prepare yourself for our next conversation,
in which we are going to talk about some of the practices,
some of the ways that we as Christians
do have agency as we seek to lean into and grow in the discipline of peace,
you might prepare yourself for that.
You might take this conversation as an invitation for self-reflection.
If you wanted to really begin to take this as a moment of self-checkup,
you could leave this conversation and you
could ask yourself that question,
whether you go on a walk and you reflect on it,
whether you sit down with a blank piece of paper and you journal it,
whether you find a friend that you’re going to
have a conversation with about it.
There are many, many ways that you can engage with a spiritual
question of this type,
but it is worth asking ourselves,
to what extent have I wore the lenses
of anxiety and fear and struggle and opposition in these days?
And has there been a more insidious
move within ourselves to push some things away,
to hide ourselves from some things
that make us uncomfortable?
Because if so,
those may be places where we’re called to engage.
And I say that with a little bit of fear and trepidation,
because there are places,
Clint, much like our conversation weeks ago when we talked about forgiveness and the call to forgive,
we’re digging deep into some of our own brokenness and realities there.
And so as we engage some of
our fears and anxieties,
especially if this is an area in your own person where you are
very much prone to go,
we might want to tread lightly.
But yet it is important as people of
faith that we take seriously that God desires to work within us spirits of peace.
And if we have
in this time taken on glasses,
worldviews, lenses of anxiety and fear and opposition,
then that is a place where God desires to work within us wholeness,
stillness,
shelter,
even sanctuary.
And then God is able to do that if we’re willing to engage in the process.
It seems to me that one of the blessings and curses of this season has been that it has removed
so many of the things that we looked forward to,
that we were blessed by,
that we might even say
we’re peace building in our own life,
you know, our time with family,
church,
attendance,
holidays,
et cetera.
But perhaps what some of us are learning in that time is that the anxiety
was always in us and those things distracted us and kept us from it.
And so rather than create
new anxiety in us,
one of the things that this season has done is remove some of the barriers
we put up to try and keep it at bay.
The fences we built around it have been taken down.
And that’s a brutally difficult thing to do when we lose those barriers and we have to turn
face to face with that thing we’ve been trying not to admit,
we’ve been trying not to deal with,
and we’ve been trying to avoid.
However,
the beautiful invitation in that is that if we can
find some courage, if we can find some fortitude and embrace that challenge,
we may be able to
come to understand that as we move back into our life,
hopefully in the coming days,
in months,
we can do so without that anxiety,
without needing to wall it off,
because we will have developed a
new ability to project peace,
to experience peace that doesn’t need the distractions.
And then we can enjoy those things even at a new level,
because they’re no longer self-serving.
They are only about the thing itself and not about trying to use the thing to keep me from something else.
I think that there are lots of us in this moment who are carrying burdens that we haven’t considered,
and one of the struggles as those who have received grace is to sometimes encounter
the reality of how much grace we absolutely need,
and yet the God who encounters the people of faith
all throughout the scriptures repeatedly in that address says,
“Do not be afraid.” So wherever you are today,
however you’re listening to this conversation,
if you find yourself in a moment
in which you are beset by fear and anxiety,
and if you would say,
“You know, I don’t really feel
that, but it’s probably there somewhere,
and I just avoided it,” hear this.
The God of peace
still reigns, and not in just sort of a happy platitude posted on your Facebook wall kind of way.
The God of peace who created all things,
who we encounter in Jesus Christ,
who we find new life
by the power of the Spirit,
that very God is working,
and so we do not need to be afraid to enter in
to some of these challenging
and difficult practices of faith.
And friends, if we do choose
to allow God to work,
as God does in mysterious and beautiful ways,
even in the midst of struggle,
we will find that peace is a reality that not only exists,
but that we can take part in.
And if you’ve struggled to live in that place,
I hope that this isn’t in any way
an attack or you don’t feel beaten up by it.
I hope you feel that this is an invitation
to begin the journey to claim what God desires for you.
And if we’re able to do that as people of faith,
I think not only our witness to the goodness of God will be increased,
but, Clint, I do think we will be better able to create that external peace in the world that God truly
does desire, this kingdom that God wants to bring to bear.
We can be partners in if we’re willing
to engage in some of those struggles that we find within ourselves.
I think the way forward in faith is always a challenge,
and for some of us it challenges us
at different places.
We each have a different struggle that our own particular makeup and our
own particular struggles with sin play out in our life.
And if for you that is anxiety,
then I hope this will be an invitation to be willing to at least engage in some of the
conversation of what it might look like to take even small steps forward in that struggle.
If that’s not a struggle for you,
then give thanks for that.
And maybe it’s some other
thing that you need to think about.
But if peace has been difficult,
and I suspect for many of us
it has been at some time in this last year,
then I think this is a moment where we can perhaps
reflect on what it would look like to try to open ourselves to allow more of the peace of Christ
in our lives and what it might mean for us and for others.
As you said, Clint, this week our intention is to invite us all to be self-reflective about
peace in our lives.
And next week we’re going to talk about some tools,
some practices, some ways of practicing agency as we seek to allow God to fashion within us that reality of peace,
and that we might also work for that peace in the world around us.
We hope that you found this conversation helpful.
Hope that you will return next week for the part two and conclusion of this miniseries.
We hope you’re blessed and we look forward to continuing the conversation
with you next week.
Thanks everyone.