- Aug 1, 2022
- 3 min read
“Peace to your house.”
Embrace the Within.
I can’t live a life of dishonesty and portray honesty. I can’t tell folks to do one thing while I do another. I can’t be of two minds about things in which I profess to believe. And a lot of that involves calling myself out on beliefs and thoughts and actions that do not reflect what I want my values to be. And it is perfectly alright to be struggling with getting yourself aligned. I am struggling with alignment with God’s path for me every day. It is not just waking up and walking correctly. Life is a struggle even if you’re doing it wrong. Life’s an equally or even more difficult struggle if you are attempting to do it correctly. So don’t think I don’t struggle, you don’t struggle, they don’t struggle. We all struggle.
BUT am I struggling just to struggle or am I struggling with getting better? And I think that is the focus to adopt. I might be struggling just as much as I was fourteen days ago, however, my struggles are getting me somewhere I want to go. Fourteen days ago, my struggles were getting me more of the same. And I didn’t want to be the same.
I was always reading and studying and learning. I was always working towards finding a way to live that aligned with my values and what I believed the world was meant to be like. And, that journey got me to appreciate the ideas I had taken for granted when I was a child. I took for granted all the time spent in church when I was a kid. I didn’t appreciate the time and opportunity I had as a kid growing up in a church with a family. It took me having my own family and being afraid that the government was going to starve them to really kick start this journey back to the basics of understanding. It took the idea that folks were going to take away my family to get things right with myself and my God.
It’s easy to fall back into complacency. It’s easy to forget the lessons I was being taught during the fourteen days. It’s easy to go back to blindly trusting in the systems of humans. It’s easy to think that folks are looking out for each other. Some of us are BUT the majority of folks are broken, are lost, and even some are wicked. They aren’t living aligned with goodness. They aren’t working on being better people. They aren’t working as images of God. They are struggling to make things worse.
And that is the choice we get to make in daily decisions. Am I on the right side of this thing called life? Am I doing my best to bring order and peace to the world around me? Am I doing my best to make things better for myself and my neighbors? Am I doing my best to make the world into a natural garden or concrete creation?
These are questions we all need to consider if we are going to start working our way along the journey to be more like Christ. We started out in a garden and Christ waited there for arrest. There is a pastoral motif that permeates the stories of peace in the Old Testament. The disciples were rescued from the cities and brought to the countryside to learn. There is a long process of connecting to nature that we need to not neglect. Find your garden and plant some seeds.
Peace to your home. Bless your being. The reign of God is now. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.