peace
In the late afternoon, while I stand in the kitchen strategizing, with ingredients for four different meals sizzling or simmering or slicing under the knife, with mixing bowls and crumb dotted small appliance parts gathering at the sink, I realize I have run out of spoons, and I don’t mean the kind I use for cooking. I borrow the metaphor, which has become well known, from Christine Miserandino, who used it once upon a time to tell her best friend how it felt to have lupus. Although my situation doesn’t exactly compare, I find the metaphor apt for describing life with all of our chronic conditions. In my house, we have several: autism, type 1 diabetes, epilepsy, and, as a natural by-product, stress.
Just like that, and me not even half way done, I recognize the signs: I’m almost out of energy. More than drained, I feel hollow. From head to toe, my muscles ache, and the lower half of my body seems especially mutinous. This has happened many times before. I look around the room through eyes suddenly hazed with sleep, and I press on. I consult my list, drawing solid lines through things I’ve finished–ah, finished!–adding satisfying check marks, with a flourish. I tap my pencil on a snatch of paper. Just this item and this one and that one, and I’ll be done. Done! My doing heart soars.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m always striving for the finish, with its unique kind of rest, that satisfying feeling that, with nothing left that must.be.done, my hands can finally fall still in peace. But nothing stays done; that’s the trouble. “I have told you these things so that in me you will have peace. In this world, you will have trouble,” Jesus said. (John 16:33, emphasis mine); the word in the Greek there translated “trouble” more specifically means internal pressure. And the thing is, most of my everyday trouble revolves around finishing things that will only be undone again. We live in a hungry, deconstructing place. Even our bodies will not stay full or whole. As the prophet Haggai put it,
You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.
Haggai 1:6 NIV
I plunge my hands into the soapy sink; the hot water pinks my fingers. I whisper back to Haggai: I clean this kitchen, and we dirty it again.
I feel the pressure of living in this world, of pressing on to get things done without the hope that they will ever stay completed. At the end of the day’s race, I fall apart and fall asleep, and in the morning, somehow reassembled, I wake up to find myself standing back at the start. Herein maybe lies our mutual fascination with looping Groundhog Day style plots. Somewhere down deep, some of us wonder if “getting it right” could finally mean moving on.
Jesus understood this. Parched from travel and exceedingly tired, he sat down beside a well in “enemy” territory. And then a woman came, a woman who walked to that well every day to fill water jars for her family, jars they emptied, jars she emptied again and again and again. I am that woman. I turn off the faucet now, flattening my hand over the shiny steel, and I wonder how much of her day that poor woman spent filling jars that would only empty to quench a thirst that would always return. Feeling her weariness more than his own that day, Jesus spoke to her good news of living water, saying, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst (John 4:13-14).”
I settle a saucepan, dripping clean, into the draining rack and turn to wipe down the counters.
The woman at the well said to Jesus then exactly what I say to Him now, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water (John 4: 13-15, emphasis mine).” Please Lord, show me the way to peace. In scripture, both the Hebrew and Greek words for peace have literal meanings centered on completeness, wholeness, and rest. I realize now that when I strive to finish, it’s really peace I seek. And yet, Jesus spoke of peace as a gift He gives (John 14:27), not as something we accomplish for ourselves. Angels sang in worship about this gift, “on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests (Luke 2:14, emphasis mine),” the night Mary gave birth to the Christ.
I toss the wash cloth back into the sink, watch it disappear beneath the bubbles. Ignoring the complaints of my feet, I stir spices into a simmering pot–cumin, cinnamon, curry. Richness drifts extravagantly up, and I stop a moment to breathe it in, thinking about how everything shadows the reality of Christ (Colossians 2:17). Jesus said, “…in me you will have peace. In this world, you will have trouble.” Perhaps the path to peace has very little to do with how much work I finish forever, and a whole lot more to do with where, or in whom, I seek it.
This morning, I cradled my coffee and cherished an old verse all new. In fact, at the break of day, the Word remade me, because right there on the cross, in the brutal thickness of that falling apart text, I found that for which I have long searched:
Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.”
John 19:28-30 (emphasis mine)
“…in me you may have peace.” In the span of three verses, scripture reiterates three times a three-day finish that cannot be undone. In case I’m wondering; in case my performing personality should conjure up another spiritual to do list I can never quite complete, the Spirit makes this completely clear: The work of Jesus? Finished, finished, finished. His work is complete, so we can, once and forevermore, be whole. An old hymn drifts through my thoughts, the notes old and full. Peace, perfect peace. Jesus, taking on himself all our incredible human thirst, took his last unsatisfying, unquenching drink of this world, voluntarily gave up his life, and forever finished futility. And so, to the woman at the well, Jesus spoke of never thirsting again. And just before the cross, Jesus promised his disciples peace, even while acknowledging their trouble. “Take heart,” he said. Be encouraged! “I have conquered the world (John 16:33).
I glance at my list and the clock and stand back on my sore heels, lifting that lid for another deep, fragrant breath. The feast only just simmers now, and I think maybe the big finish I seek is not of my own making at all.
