Waiting For Peace To Arrive

Waiting for Peace to Arrive

You didn’t choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit.

John 15:16

Nobody learns to ride a bicycle by simply poring over instruction manuals. At some point you’ve got to climb onto the contraption, strap on your helmet, and start pedaling, risking a few spills along the way. But once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing like wheeling down the road and feeling the sun caressing your shoulders and the wind blowing through your hair. Similarly, if you want to forge a life of greater peace, you can’t just read about it or hear other people talk about it. You have to do something about it.

Catherine Whitmire is an author who is committed to making peace in the world around her. Several years ago she became exhausted as she fought hard against various social evils like poverty and violence. She longed, she said, “to feel truly alive,” explaining that she “was tired of waiting for others to create the culture of peace I had been envisioning.” So Whitmire decided to try living as if the peace she longed for had already arrived. Because she was intent on forming relationships with people who were not a carbon copy of herself, she decided to move to a more diverse neighborhood than the one she had been living in. She also expanded her garden, opened her home for community singing parties, took walks with friends, and hosted annual celebrations with neighbors, including welcoming the first flower each spring.

As Whitmire began living the life she had imagined, she started to feel physically, spiritually, and emotionally restored, renewed in her desire to work for greater peace in the world. “I had been waiting for peace to arrive,” she explains, “but what I discovered is that it is more likely to appear when we begin living it.”^a

What about you? Are you waiting for peace to arrive, expecting God to hand it to you on a silver platter? Why not, instead, take time to think and pray about the kind of life you want to live? Once you have an idea of what that might look like, ask God to help you make wise decisions so you can start living it.

Father, I want to live the best life possible—one that will produce fruit that lasts. Give me the wisdom to know what changes I need to make in order to fulfill your purpose for my life.

^a Catherine Whitmire, Practicing Peace (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2007), 28–29.