Peace—The Tranquility of Order

Mel Lawrenz

How do you search for order in your life when there is so much disorder all around you?

Some people walked the streets of Rome dazed and dumbfounded. Others scurried along walls like rats trying to keep out of sight. Atop the walls wearied soldiers shot arrows randomly and to little effect. The pounding of a battering ram resumed in the early morning hours. Its dull thud did more to demoralize the city inhabitants than the arrows that rained down on the streets and buildings.

It was on a summer day, August 24, in the year 410 that the unthinkable happened to the citizens of the great city of Rome. For days the Visigothic king, Alaric, had besieged the city until finally the gates flew open, and for the first time in 800 years a foreign army occupied and plundered the city. The siege went on for three long days. This was the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire, and many Romans blamed the now numerous Christians for upsetting the gods and bringing on the disaster.

Peace as Order

The great Christian leader and theologian, Augustine of Hippo, replied to this charge, saying that Christians were not to blame for calamity, neither were the pagan gods responsible for good fortune. The world consists of those who belong to the City of Man (because their chief love is themselves) and those who belong to the City of God (because their first love is God).

Where can we find peace in a world so beset with tensions and conflicts? Augustine offered a compelling definition. He called peace “the tranquility of order.”

If peace is “the tranquility of order,” it is so much more than just the absence of conflict. If a husband and wife stop the quarrels and shouting matches only to fall into icy indifference, do they have peace? If a boss and his former employee settle a lawsuit out of court, is that peace? And what about spiritual conflict? If a person who has been wrestling with painful doubts and unanswered spiritual questions finally gets numb about it all, does that mean that he or she has come to a place of peace?

God has something much better in mind for us than just the lessening of conflict in our lives. Health doesn’t mean just not having broken bones or not having a black eye. We long for much more than that. Deep inside we are looking for an orderliness of our thoughts and passions, our motives and our aspirations. And when we can experience that, even if incomplete or passing, there is a sense of peace—the tranquility of order.

An ordering is a kind of patterning. When we say to God: please, oh please help me get my life in order, that is an appeal for divine assistance to get things sorted out, to understand what is important, what thoughts and motives need to be thrown out, what matters to put at the top of the priority list, what good habits to develop and stick with. Peace has to be a pattern because occasional and tentative cease-fires produce neither contentment nor virtue.

First Steps Toward Peace

Peace begins with our relationship with God. If you’re fighting with God, or if there is a Cold War going on between you and God, then the un-tranquility of disorder is going to be the pattern of your life. Why should that be? Why can’t a human being say to the Divine—”I’ll just leave you alone, you leave me alone, and everything will be fine”? That doesn’t work (never has, never will, never could) because the very order of the universe is based on the relationship of the Creator and the created. God, who is spectacularly glorious and good, benevolent and powerful, who is the master craftsman, brought the whole universe into being, and then put human beings right at the top of the whole order. And he still stands over it all, proud of what is good, and especially of what is “very good.” He is pained by the cracks and flaws that have been introduced into the creation, but ready to heal and one day re-create. This is the order of all things. It is where we find tranquility, or peace. Live like you’re an animal and you won’t have peace; live like you’re God and you won’t have peace. Peace is the continual rehearsal of standing in the right spot in the grand order of things—not lower, not higher. Alaric didn’t know that. And what determines if we are barbarians is not whether we know how to dress, eat, or write letters, but whether we accept our proper place in the universe.

The Gift of Shalom

The Hebrews greeted each other with a single word of well-wishing, a kind of prayer that prays it all: “Shalom.” It means “peace to you.” It is not merely saying, “I hope nobody beats you up today,” but rather, may you enjoy security and safety, may you experience harmony and accord in all parts of your life, and I wish you soundness, completeness, and health in every respect. What could be better in your life than to have “Shalom,” not just once in a great while, but as the rhythm of your life?

How do we develop a pattern of peace?

Let’s begin with Jesus’ words: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27). There is a peace that the world gives, but Jesus-peace is different.

A good friend of mine, Bob, was in the War of the Pacific. His young wife, Win, waited anxiously to get each letter so that she could be assured that he was still alive. And he made it through the battle of Guadalcanal and all the rest and returned home when “peace” had been achieved in 1945. How bewildered they were, and so many other families, to have to tear apart again so that young men could board ships bound, this time, for Korea. The gap in between, a mere five years.

And then came the end of the Korean War. The guns stopped, but was it peace? Last year I had the privilege of meeting and teaching among the dynamic Christians of South Korea. One day they drove me to the infamous 38th parallel, the two-mile wide demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, one of the tensed places in the world. Wall after wall of barbed wire fences, concrete barriers, and, across the valley, one lookout tower after another with soldiers peering across. A sign instructed that this was a military zone and warned against making any sudden or suspicious movements, and banned any cameras out of the case.

The peace that the world gives is often just a time for reloading.

Jesus was about to leave his disciples, knowing that they would witness the horror of his slow execution, but he wanted to let them know that his final act on earth would bring a permanent peace. He left them violently, but he left them with the promise of peace. And days after his blood had dried at the base of his cross, a resurrected Jesus appeared to his disciples and picked up where he had left off, as he greeted them with: “Peace be with you.”

Lord of Peace

Paul said, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). He explained that this peace came “through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20). Paul poured out his well-wishing whenever he wrote, longing for people to experience real peace: “Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way” (2 Thessalonians 3:16); “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him” (Romans 15:13). Why? Because “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33). And so our mandate is to set patterns of peace in our lives: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18); “Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification” (Romans 14:19). When we promote peace, we experience peace: “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said, because they really are children of God.

Experiencing Tranquility

Here are some things we can do to experience “the tranquility of order”:

1. Value peace in your relationships. If it matters little to us if we are in conflict or if we have peace, then we will not work toward peace. Some people who have grown up with a lot of conflict actually are unsettled if there isn’t tension in the air. Realize that if you value order in your relationships, you are giving a great gift to other people. You are saying to them: you are valuable enough to me that I will do the work necessary to keep our accounts settled.

2. Do as much as you can to promote peace in your relationships, but realize that you are limited, too. The Bible is giving us a very realistic assessment when it says: “as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18). In other words, you can only do what you can do. Sometimes, as hard as you try to resolve a dispute or settle a tension with someone else, it just doesn’t happen, because the other person doesn’t do what he or she needs to do. You cannot accomplish peace at any price. If you sacrifice truth for the sake of peace, you will have a fragile resolution at best, and less of a chance that you will find real peace the next time around.

3. If you feel like you are at a place of general disorder in your life, pick one or two very specific areas where you can enjoy some structure. Focus on one relationship that is working well, one role where you are doing well, even one room in your house you can get in order. Years ago when I was trying to begin writing my doctoral dissertation, I was stuck. Just plain stuck. One problem was that I felt disordered in so many places in my life. I wasn’t on top of things in my work at the church, the house wasn’t in order, my wife and I hadn’t spent enough time with each other. Then, one Saturday, I decided to bring order to the most disorderly part of our household: our garage. I really dug in, throwing out every junkie thing I shouldn’t hold onto, finding a place for every tool, figuring a scheme of where to find the glue, and the rope, and the ladder, and everything else. When that chaos turned to order—in just that one small part of my life—I was able to turn to other areas and do the same, just one thing at a time. And best of all, I took control of that nasty dissertation project. I really believe to this day that cleaning out my garage was an integral step in getting my doctorate done. In this life there will always be a fair amount of disorder, of course. What we need is a basic sense of the grand order of things, and then we can taste the peace that goes beyond understanding.

4. Do not confuse peace with an obsessive, controlling desire for order. If you know you have a somewhat compulsive personality, and you know that you frustrate others out of your insistence that they order themselves according to your standards, then stop and assess what kind of order you are looking for in life. We don’t achieve peace when we drive other people crazy by fastidiously trying to iron every wrinkle out of life. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” may be a good general principle, but we need to realize life is always in flux. Things move. People come and go. Sometimes you get your list checked off, and sometimes not. The most important things to keep in order (“as far as it depends on you”!) are your relationships—with God, then with your family, then with others. You can hope and expect others to try to conform to God’s standards for order, but that may be different from your standards for order, which may not apply to them.

5. Open your eyes to the order of the creation. Let God keep reminding you in this way that he is a God of order, and he knows how to create harmony and interdependence. Yes, there are such disorderly things as earthquakes, forest fires, and floods. But the ordinary face of creation is a perpetual essay about the natural tranquility that God values, and the goal he has charged human beings to promote. To study the creation is to read a book God has put right in front of our eyes. In this book are written truths about uniformity and variety, growth and development. The creation is an upward grade leading to the ultimate personality and mind that conceived and willed it into existence. There is a tranquility of order that comes from growing in your understanding of your own creatureliness. Humanity does not stand apart from creation, but is part of it, so we should learn about how God orders life by studying how he orders the creation.

6. Take advantage of the periods of peace you enjoy in life. There will be many times when we are wrestling through conflicts, or grieving losses, or enduring pain. When we are in calm waters, however, we should make the most of it, learning about the way things ought to be. When our relationships are in good order, we should reflect on that, developing our convictions about what peace is, and how we can preserve “the tranquility of order.”

 

PRAY THIS:

Dear Lord, I need your help today because I don’t always see the perfection of your order in this world and in my life. Help me to have faith at all times that you are in control, and to trust your promise of peace in my life. Help me to be a peace-lover and a peacemaker. Forgive me for ways in which I have engaged in fights with others. Show me in new ways how you have already won the war against evil. As the final battles move toward the end, help me to be an ambassador of your peace, glad to be in your service.

Amen

FOR PERSONAL REFLECTION:

1. Which areas of your life seem now, or have seemed in the past, like major battles instead of peace?

2. When have you experienced the peace of God in your life? Did this peace appear instantaneously after a long struggle?  Did peace come because you did something?”

3. When is it difficult for you to trust in the peace of Christ? Can you identify why it is difficult to trust Christ’s peace at that particular time?

4. With God’s help, what specific steps could you take in the weeks to come to set patterns of order and peace in your life?

5. How can others pray for you?

[Excerpt from Patterns: Ways to Develop a God-Filled Life by Mel Lawrenz]