For Peace Sake: Rest in Peace

You can see it in people’s faces. Even their smile is weighted down with the cares of life, so many things to do just to keep up with things. Making peace is as much about getting people to rest as it is about actively engaging in reconnecting. Frantic rushing, stressed our fussing doesn’t improve situations. We don’t have to be dead to be able to rest in peace. Time out for a break, a few moments catching some fresh air, (maybe climbing Mount Snowdon) can do as much good as hours slaving over a hot desk.

This post was sent out on Friday 26th September.

The real scriptural basis for this thought is found in Matthew 11:28-30. It is an amazing invitation that Jesus offers here and a radical one. This invitation is also implicit in what it is to be a peacemaker – inviting stressed out, anxious, fearful, panicky, people to come to rest. We are motivated to work with no sense of rest as we’re driven to go on and on to get the next wage and the next job and the next Christmas shopping and the next children’s clothes for school and the next major life purchase and the next … and the next … with no rest, no final peace, no final consolation in life. By the time retirement comes around there’s a helplessness and hopelessness and fraught wondering what to do with time that was spent going from the next … to the next. Oh but the wonder of discipleship is not go from the next to the next, but to rest and be unburdened from that which moves us on to something that never satisfies, never brings that sense of wholeness that is summed up in the Hebrew concept of Shalom.

When we engage with others on the peacemaking process it is to invite them to rest. Not to ongoing exertions beyond our abilities. Only in Jesus do we find this rest. Truly this is the peace that passes understanding as its not just chilling the mind and the body, it’s completely resting in Christ.

For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
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