Are you free to experience peace or is something holding you back?
“So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free.”
John 8:36 (NLT)
My cat Joy, like most cats, loves yarn, ribbon, tassels, or anything she can get her claws into. But occasionally she gets tangled up in it and needs help getting free. She enjoys playing, but my way of releasing her is to carefully pry it away from her while her way is to chew her way through it. She fights me then because she thinks her way is better and doesn’t want me to interfere. For her (and me) peace is her being set free from the tangle of yarn that could strangle her but the method of release is what we differ on.
Some of the things in life that destroy our peace are like tangled yarn. They are pretty, enticing, and fun to play with, but if we aren’t careful can create a stranglehold on us. A thought just flashed into my mind’s eye of the old cowboy shows I watched as a child. Ropes were good for a lot of things from lassoing a stubborn calf to tying a horse to a post so it wouldn’t run off. Ropes were also used by angry people when they formed a lynching mob and someone died by strangulation.
If you don’t have peace in your life, there is most likely something in the way. Ask God to show you what it is that’s interfering. It’s just like our finicky cell phones. Sometimes I have to move to a different spot to get a good signal because an appliance or a wall is interfering. I wonder why I can’t access a website and when I check my connection, I find out my wi-fi was turned off. I wonder why I’m not receiving notifications but when I check my settings, it was on silent. You probably have similar frustrations or could add to my list. Those frustrations are like many others—something we need to resolve or remove from our lives so the peace can flow through. As long as we allow things, frustrations, people, and situations to have our attention, that’s where our minds go and peace has no place to settle in. We must give peace space to reside and let it expand until we are totally free of those things that hold us back.
Peace, Peace, Wonderful Peace is what we need. Take a break and watch this video of piano music with the lyrics to this old hymn on a background of soothing peaceful video. Do you feel more peaceful now? In the next post I’ll talk about having peace in the midst of the storm.