Category: Theme — Volume 6 · 4 min read
It is not the absence of stress. It is not the resolution of every problem. It is something quieter and deeper than that — wholeness, rightness, every part of you settled in its proper place.
When you say you want some peace, what you usually mean is that you want everyone to stop needing things from you for an hour.
That's not a criticism. It's a reasonable thing to want, and you probably can't have it, and that's most of the problem right there.
Because if peace is the absence of demand, then peace is something other people control. It arrives when the phone stops, when the kids settle, when the thing at work resolves. Which means you're waiting on conditions that have never once held still for you, and you've been waiting a long time.
I want to look at the word itself, because I think we've been using a much smaller version of it than the one we were handed.
The word behind most of the peace language in the Old Testament is shalom. And it isn't built around absence. It's built around completeness — every part of a thing present and functioning and in its right place. Nothing missing. Nothing broken.
That's why it worked as a greeting. When someone said it to you, they weren't wishing you a calm afternoon. They were asking after the whole of you — your body, your household, your work, your standing with God — and hoping it was all intact.
Sit with that for a second, because it changes the arithmetic.
If peace means nothing is going wrong, then peace and your actual life are mutually exclusive, and they will be for the next twenty years.
But if peace means every part of you is where it belongs, then it becomes something else entirely. Not the reward for solving your problems. A condition that can exist inside unsolved problems — because the question is no longer whether the pressure has stopped, but whether you're still whole underneath it.
That's harder in some ways. It's also possible, which the other version wasn't.
Now, the counterfeit.
There's a line in Jeremiah where God says the priests and prophets have been treating the wound of God’s people lightly, telling everyone peace, peace, when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14). Dressing a serious injury with a bandage and calling it handled.
We do that to ourselves constantly.
You decide not to think about the thing. You don't raise it. You keep the house calm by keeping your mouth shut, and by nine o'clock the quiet in the room is genuine and nothing whatsoever has been resolved. That's not shalom. That's a wound with a bandage on it, and your body keeps the account even when you don't.
The difference between the two is whether anything is actually in its place.
Here's the picture I keep coming back to.
Gideon — the same man hiding in the winepress, the one who was sure he was the least in his father's house — builds an altar and names it The Lord Is Peace (Judges 6:24).
Look at when he does it. The Midianites are still camped in the valley. Nothing has been won. He hasn't fought anything yet, he's still afraid, he's about to ask for two more signs because he can't quite believe what he's been told.
And in the middle of all of that, unresolved, he sets up a marker and gives it that name.
He isn't describing his circumstances. He's naming something about God that stays true while the circumstances are still a mess.
That's the whole thing, I think.
Peace was never the state of your calendar. Peace is also not a destination nor some future date or circumstance you long for. It's what holds while your calendar is what it is.
There's a line in Philippians about a peace that doesn't make sense, and what it says that peace does is stand guard over your heart and mind (Philippians 4:7). Guard. Not remove you from the situation. Not fix it. Stand between you and the thing so it can't get all the way in.
You are not going to feel that on Tuesday because everything got easier. It doesn't work that way, and I'd be lying to you if I said it did.
But you might find, in the middle of a week that hasn't improved at all, that something underneath you has stopped moving around.
That's not nothing. That's the beginning of the real thing.
Shalom
Volume Six of the Direction Series is called Peace. If this sat with you, you can begin at directionseries.com.
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