Promised Peace

When I was young and heard this reading, I believed that the peace Jesus spoke of was a feeling.

I had experienced a beautiful peace when I came to know Jesus for the first time as a conscious adult (well, as a teenager. I thought I was an adult!) ‘This must be the promised peace’ I reasoned, and it was beautiful to experience rest as “a weaned child in its mother’s arms”(Psalm 131:2).

As I have grown in maturity, feelings of peace have come and gone with different seasons of life. Like a person swimming in the ocean, I have gone up and down with the waves of my circumstances. However, in today’s reading, Jesus alerts us to the foundation of a peace that “the world cannot give” when he says: “I love the Father and … I am doing exactly what the Father told me”.

It is possible for us to go deeper into the peace of God, beyond the breakers and into the calm of the deeper ocean. What it requires of us is a deep faith in the goodness of God, throwing ourselves into a loving and trusting relationship with Him. 

There we will no longer be at the mercy of the waves.