“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27a) Peace. Blessed peace. If you’re like most Americans, you’ve had a hectic couple of weeks: prepping and cooking for family gatherings, shopping the “big deals”, decorations coming out and going up. Have you even been able to catch a breath? The truth is we bring all this on ourselves. That’s right. We stress about whether the house is clean enough. Then we stress if we have all the right foods and if there’ll be enough to go around, finding later we have leftovers for days. Then we pressure ourselves into thinking Christmas will be a disaster if our third cousin twice removed doesn’t get that perfect shirt that was only $17.50 instead of $37. After that, we’re climbing, bending, stooping, and crawling to put up every single perfect decoration that we’ll then have to clean around for more than a month. And all this before we lose hours of sleep wrapping and trimming perfectly every single gift and placing it ever so delicately into a Jenga-style arrangement beneath the tree. Whew! It’s little wonder that the suicide rate is so much higher around this time of year.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27a) Peace. Blessed peace. If you’re like most Americans, you’ve had a hectic couple of weeks: prepping and cooking for family gatherings, shopping the “big deals”, decorations coming out and going up. Have you even been able to catch a breath? The truth is we bring all this on ourselves. That’s right. We stress about whether the house is clean enough. Then we stress if we have all the right foods and if there’ll be enough to go around, finding later we have leftovers for days. Then we pressure ourselves into thinking Christmas will be a disaster if our third cousin twice removed doesn’t get that perfect shirt that was only $17.50 instead of $37. After that, we’re climbing, bending, stooping, and crawling to put up every single perfect decoration that we’ll then have to clean around for more than a month. And all this before we lose hours of sleep wrapping and trimming perfectly every single gift and placing it ever so delicately into a Jenga-style arrangement beneath the tree. Whew! It’s little wonder that the suicide rate is so much higher around this time of year.
The world about us is constantly on the go with its goals and deadlines. There is always the “next thing”. And even if you have a second or two, your mind is already thinking ahead to that “next thing”. This is the kind of peace the world gives. We often tend to lose sight of the fact that Christmas was meant as a Christ mass, a celebration of our Savior: His birth, life, death, and resurrection. He did it all for us, you know, so that we wouldn’t have to worry and stress, which is what He said in today’s passage. His peace confuses the heck out of the world because it’s a peace that the world can’t take away. The world will say, “You can have this for the cost of ___,” but Christ’s peace isn’t that way at all. It really is something for nothing more than trust, faith, belief, whatever word you wish to use. We aren’t pressured, and the only deadline is death itself, although life here is so much more enjoyable when we accept Christ before that deadline.
So if you want to serve the meals, do the shopping, work at decorating, do it because you want to and not because you must. When what we do becomes a labor of love without stress, that’s when we feel the Jesus peace.
