Advent's Fourth Sunday: Peace

If making cookies is messy, and if wrapping presents takes up all the floor space, and if decorating paper maché Santas with glitter leaves traces of the project throughout the house for months afterwards, why wouldn't the remaking of our hearts be a disorganized mess as well? Is God's craft of making real sons and daughters out of fleshly, bumbling, head-strong creatures an exception to the mess of creation? Is our transformation to be a tidy and systematic endeavor?

I don't think so.

We are a project just started by the Lord, and while completion is guaranteed, right now we're rather like my "Peace" ornament that my children recently broke. So much for peace. It's not all there.

We are incomplete, and yet completion is guaranteed. We're not like the garbage taken to the dump with no chance of being recycled. Nor are we like an abandoned ghost town, a tourist attraction for others. God has his hands on us. There was a time when God couldn't touch us because our very beings hated him. He would've had to override our wills to even get near us. But then Christ came to make us workable material. He gives us a new heart, one that God can inhabit and work within. 

This is the peace already done: God able to work in us. Now, this pain and suffering means something. All the slammed doors and cold shoulders, doctor's visits and insufficient funds, bad decisions and ugly consequences, now all these things are not just disheartening or unsettling or depressing. Now, they are the signs that God's work is being done in us and around us and through us. 

He is reworking all our malfunctioning bits to produce something glorious. In God's hands, this mess is actually a sign that he is establishing his unshakable peace in us. And he will finish this project until its completion, and the Prince of Peace reigns forever.

More on Advent: Joy, Love, Hope