Where Is The Peace? | An Advent Reflection
This time of year is often colored pretty with sparkling lights, streamers, and ornaments, decorating our homes, businesses, town centers, and even us.
But when we join family for celebrating Christmas, it’s colored a bit differently sometimes. It’s colored with drama, loud voices having intense conversations, and the beauty of Christmas becomes a bane of holiday.
Where is the peace?
For many, the season is not just marked by awkward conversations or unmet expectations, but by the accumulated weight of broken relationships, unresolved grief, injustice that never found its reckoning, wounds that never healed, and the quiet ache of evil that has brushed too close to home.
Anyone who has experienced Christmas time without major family drama has escaped a reality most of us have come to understand and expect depending on which of our extended family contingent comes over to celebrate Christ’s birthday— if they are truly celebrating Christ at all or merely being caught up in the consumeristic culture we have been firmly embraced.
Where is the peace?
We sing peace on earth, goodwill to men only to be greeted by the will of those men and women’s unspoken expectations for the image of holiday locked within their childhood minds. The heart of Christmas is placed on the shelf, next to the elf.
Where is the peace?
Where? Where it might be and when it might come gets lost in the hustle and hurry from home to home or the scattered loved ones who seem to unwrap gifts, eat and run. Some fortunate to longer stay still fade in the memory of the smoldering Yule log as the final twinkle of the Christmas tree lights blink once more in the year’s final night.
Where is the peace?
And for others—those whose holidays are calm and orderly—peace still feels distant because beneath the surface lives a persistent restlessness, a loneliness they can’t quite name, and a soul tired of performing strength while longing to be held, seen, and finally at rest.
“For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His government and its peace will never end. He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David for all eternity. The passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies will make this happen!” Isaiah 9:6-7 NLT
Where the peace is cannot be understood so much as knowing WHO is our peace. Our peace comes from One who is the embodiment of what our soul longs for deep within its depth. Our peace is brought to us by the hope of a Ruler on the throne who proves fairness and justice are byproducts of a peaceful rule by a King who is passionate about peace and committed to have every one of us experience peace in a way our eyes now could only blink to see what hope for eternal peace we get from the Mighty God who came a child born to us as one of us— stepped into our hot mess of family drama and linguistic intensity to rescue us from the frightful reality of that which holds us back from ever receiving true peace on earth.
He came not for a colored spotlight placed perfectly upon a tree without one strand of tinsel out of place, but for us to experience a sort of peace that will never end because he is unending with no beginning to encircle us in his eternal love that is only known to us in full surrender of what we think we know or how we think we are as revealed by the God who came for us.
“Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.” Isaiah 53:4-6 NLT
Where is the peace?
True peace is rooted in only One source from the power by which peace originated in the rest of our Creator before the first breath of chaos carved its mark on the back of humanity’s cry.
Peace is found at the crossroads of surrender.
To surrender to the peace of Christ is to be embraced by a God who is the fullness of peace always and gives it freely through Jesus when we release our expectations and drama and allow him entry among our mess for his will and his plan to make this happen in us, through us, forever!
Peace is ours when we come to Christ for what peace only he could give when we open our hearts and hands in surrender to the person of whom a Name no other on earth has ever been given: Prince of Peace.
Where is the peace?
When we surrender to Jesus, not as a religious answer, but as relief from what we have and know what he has, know his peace fully.
So today, we stop searching for peace in circumstances or control and come instead to Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
We come as we are—tired, restless, guarded, numb, or quietly worn down—and we release what we were never meant to carry.
We remember, peace isn’t something we create; it’s someone we receive.
If you’re willing, surrender now to Jesus and receive his peace.
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace- let your rule rest on our hearts, lay down the weight we carry, and establish your peace within us—now and without end. Amen.
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