shalom
“Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading,” Adam calls out, his voice dry and deep, an early crackling that sounds a bit to my imagination like the feet of God walking in the Fall of His creation.
“Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading, Bible reading.”
Adam’s a bird—my grandma used to say that about surprising people—and this is his hungry song to the morning. I stretch, wondering how many times he’ll announce those two words on repeat, hearing him from where I sit on the porch with God’s Word splayed open across my lap, hearing him through the wall and the windows, even more, as Kevin opens the door on a mission to refill our empty coffee cups. This early, the world lays dark and still around us.
I look through the dim glass, watching for a moment as my son sits down at the kitchen table and places his phone carefully in front of him. I have seen Adam try to do his chores with his phone still in one hand, or his tablet balanced on one palm and the cord dragging across the carpet behind him, oblivious to the way he mimics the rest of us courting stress, never doing just the one thing. Countless times, I have shepherded him away from distraction the way God shepherds me, the way God shepherds him through me, gently setting Adam’s addictions down so he can really live. But I can’t remember ever telling him explicitly that meeting with God in the pages of scripture isn’t something to do on the fly, with his attention splintered, ignoring his own heart’s cries for wholeness.
Shalom, that’s what we come to God seeking. We want peace, or, in other words, harmony and completeness–nothing wanting, nothing lacking, a holy health for our souls that we receive in relationship with Him. Repeated, shalom shalom means all of that in absolute perfection.
When Jesus, the Prince of Peace, said, “My peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” He meant shalom shalom. The peace that makes no sense, that guards our hearts and minds, is the gifted Bread from heaven that satisfies us every day, right through the everyday. Every morning, we come hungry and leave satisfied, like children at a feast table gobbling up their breakfast, but in fact, our peace-meal isn’t piecemeal at all, because when we come to the Word, we actually consume the forever-satisfying fullness of Christ.
Somehow, because God is who He is and because Adam needs God, Adam sits down at the kitchen table with his phone this morning and pulls up the Bible app to read. His focus solitary, he rests his arms on either side of the phone on the table and turns on the audio so he can listen and read at the same time, and it’s like I can see his brain waking up to the bilateral stimulation of it all, as Adam’s own heart miraculously awakens yet again to the One who unilaterally sealed us whole on every side, who purchased and made our peace with His own shed blood. It’s always been this way for Adam, that somehow the seeing and hearing together, that opening of both eyes and ears that God wants for all of us, this peace, this harmony even in the receiving, shortly circumvents some of Autism’s barriers to understanding. Maybe what his body simply cannot understand finds its way down into his soul. Maybe this is, as a result of the soul health it brings, as the wisdom writer said, also “healing to his flesh and refreshment to his bones.” I have faith to believe Adam’s heart can, by the power of God, receive what His mind struggles to comprehend, for this has been true in me too, for as long as I’ve known the Lord. I have power to know the love of God that surpasses knowledge.
God has said that those who see with their eyes and hear with their ears will understand, turn, and be healed.
I hear the sweetest sound now, flying free through the wall and the window and that crack in the open door, a sound my mama-heart receives like quenching for thirst, the sound of Adam’s joy, rushing through his lips. It’s as though, sitting there with his head bowed over the spoken and written Words of God, he has begun to exhale shalom.
Adam reads this morning from a chronological, whole-Bible plan, something about the idolatry of unfaithful Israel, how it had made the people unseeing and unhearing, like the things they worshipped instead of God. The Bible app voice, strident and deep, sounds like an Englishman dressed in some sort of armor, wielding a Sword for war. In reflection, I think of how this battle for our affection rages every day, for Adam just as it does for me, as we face the temptation to turn to created things instead of God, to expect them to provide for us what God alone can provide. The only always is the finished work of Christ, and the only perfect is the perfection of Christ, and I expect that some mornings, I will find Adam “reading” the Bible while he plays LepsWorld on his tablet. But not today.
He feels me looking, glances just briefly through the window, smiles tenderly at me before returning his attention to his reading, and I am drawn back to our early years, when, as a young mom toting babies back and forth to therapy, I would play the Bible on CDs in the car and sing it over sleepy heads, believing that Christ himself is the Word and that He is living and active and that in Him is the light and life of men; believing that if my babies could just touch the edge of His garment, if He would just inhabit the room, the car, the space where they lay sleeping, they could also receive His healing, His shalom shalom. And I can tell you: They have. For all the fighting they face, that we all face, beating against the challenges that would hold us captive, my children have received extraordinary peace.
Listen to what I am saying, now: This is not a story about our triumphant choices, but a story about our all-sufficient, all-powerful, endlessly-loving God, who has forever guaranteed and ordained our shalom.
