Good Fruit: Peace

In the Good Fruit series, I have decided to go against my natural inclination to be "orderly" and jot my thoughts about each fruit of the Spirit in whatever order they come to me. It's okay, really. I can deal with the fact that I've jumped from love to peace. Yup. Dealing...

To read the whole series, click here and start at the bottom.

When I envision what it's like to be a peaceful woman, I tend to imagine a calm, gentle, grandmotherly type who rests quietly with a hint of a smile on her face. When I see the woman called Peace, she is often sitting on a park bench by the lake shore. This morning, God showed me that my image of peace is all wrong!*

If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your righteousness like the waves of the sea. ~Isaiah 48:18

Rivers are anything but quiet, gentle, and still. The rush of a river is loud and fast, and can quickly overwhelm even the strongest of swimmers.

Peace may not be found by resting in solitude and breathing deeply, after all. I am beginning to see that peace is more like a living, active sensation that overwhelms and overtakes us. Just as worry laps up to cover us like the ocean's tide swallows the beach inch by inch, so too can peace. I believe we can invite peace to come in that same way - wave by wave - until it is a river rushing over us with such force that we cannot come out from under it.

I always thought that I should quietly seek out peace until I found it. I wonder how different we might all be, how different our peace might look, if we instead allowed it to wash over our heads and swallow us up.

What do you think? Have you ever really envisioned peace as a raging river?


* Credit for changing my thought process goes to Beth Moore's Living Free.