At Peace in the Storm by Ken Gire

Author:Ken Gire [Ken Gire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012120, REL012070, REL012000, Peace of mind—Religious aspects—Christianity, Consolation
ISBN: 9781441261373
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Peace Through the Body of Christ

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.[1]

Augustine

Christ’s presence in our lives often seems elusive, a bit like his appearances after the resurrection, where he draws near, then suddenly is gone. At times it seems a parlor trick of some celestial sort. He is walking with the two grieving followers on the road to Emmaus, then in the second it takes to break a loaf of bread he’s no longer with them. He materializes in a room, shows himself to the disciples, then vanishes into thin air. And finally, like an act of levitation, he ascends into the clouds as his disciples watch, mystified. His presence seems inconsistent, yet we are told that he will never leave or forsake us, that he will be with us unto the ends of the earth.

Like the popular search-and-find children’s book Where’s Waldo?—we look for Jesus in the multitude of pressures, needs, to-do lists, painful thoughts, or disorienting circumstances of our lives.

Most of us have experienced calling out to God in a moment of despair and agony, the storms of discouragement or shock reeling about us, only to feel God’s echoing silence. Maybe he’s lost my file.

We’ve all known people who claim to have had close encounters of the God kind, where Jesus comes to them in a dream or a vision or handwriting on their iPad, but most of the time, Christ limits himself to showing up via his most common, chosen vessel of spiritual communication: the body of Christ. He comes through someone who is praying, being attentive, listening to the Word or the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps in a moment of deep struggle, you’ve received a call from a friend saying, “You’ve been on my mind all day. How are you?” When yielded to Christ, we become each other’s angels unawares in feet of clay.

It’s more than a little humbling, and often frightening, to realize that Christ’s church, namely you and me, is commissioned to be God-with-skin-on to the world and to one another for the duration on this planet. It’s almost laughable. I picture an adult handing over the keys to a Lexus to their twelve-year-old kid who struggles to make his bed and turn in his homework on time. What was Jesus thinking? Honestly, most of us are so self-absorbed in our own little dramas and traumas, we rarely look up and about us with a heart to serve someone else. It seems to me that as a whole, we humans, even the most faithful among us, should not be trusted with a mission of this magnitude. That God chose to put such a divine task into our clumsy, earthy hands is beyond remarkable.

Yet the crazy truth of it is, we are called to be his love, his calm, his peace.

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