The beauty of [His] peace.

I wrote a post with a playlist back in April, and I wanted to resurrect those two songs again for today's post. With our life in seeming turmoil (I have to believe it is indeed only "seeming"), these words have been both balm to my soul and needed reminders of what my life is supposed to look like (Jesus'!), even when everything is so chaotic and uncertain.

"Garden," a song by Matt Maher, talks about how God is redeeming and renewing everything in creation, including me, and re-creating it back to what it was supposed to have been...the way life was in the Garden of Eden, when man walked and talked with God, as with a friend.

"The Beauty of Your Peace," by Tim Hughes, is the song I want to talk about. It's incredible food for thought, especially if you're like me and your mind gets frequently hijacked by the enemy and the world into self-pity and into believing lies that tell you that you should respond a certain way to the stresses of life. (For instance, multiple times a day I have to "take every [single] [little] [minuscule] thought captive" and make it obedient to Christ, like Christ, otherwise I'm consumed with thoughts like, "I have a right to be frustrated, I have a right to be stressed out, I have a right to be frazzled." But I so DO NOT have those rights, praise God. I have put on Christ. Now I have the right (and the responsibility) to choose His Peace over everything else.)

From the chorus:

Take from our souls the strain and stress

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Your peace

The beauty of Your peace

It blows my mind that the order of my life confesses how beautiful the peace of Christ is to everyone around me. Wow. And yikes. What a promise, what a responsibility.

Tony and I watched a show the other night called "Mind Games" which featured the story of Mary and Beth Stauffer, a woman and her eight-year-old daughter who were kidnapped thirty years ago by a stalker. They were raped repeatedly and held captive for two months before escaping. Right at the beginning of the show, when Mary and Beth were being interviewed, the radiance in their faces just struck me. I knew instinctively that they were believers, because what else on earth causes that kind of indescribable, inexplicable light to shine out of women who undergo that kind of experience? Sure enough, the interviewers soon highlighted the fact that Mary was a woman of "deep faith" and that at the time she and her husband were "former missionaries" (in the thirty years since, they have gone back to be missionaries in the Philippines).

I won't write every detail of their story (you can read about/watch it here), but the way she and her daughter responded to their ordeal, compared to how "normal" people would respond, was stunning, as Love often is. And her husband likewise...if you watch it, listen to how he answers a phone call from his daughter! And at one point, the interviewer says to him, "You must have felt rage, you must have wanted to get revenge." When he answered, you could see that he was hesitant to even use those words. But he was honest and said that yes, he had felt rage and even hatred...and that he had to really "work through" those feelings. Only a person concerned with being like Christ says something like that. The world does not require anything of a victim. Again, the enemy would have us believe that Mary's husband had a right to revenge and a right to rage and even a right to hate. But in Christ we are above anything the enemy can do to us, anything circumstance, any experience, any suffering. What perspective!

As usual, this was a way longer post than I intended it to be. Thanks for hanging in there, if you are still there. I promise there will be pictures and cute baby stories soon. I needed to write this all down because it's been whirling around in my head for a few days. And if anything, you can be my accountability on the days when I really want to believe that I have a right to go crazy. Days like every day coming in this sorting, packing, moving week.

May the peace of Christ be with us all!