Seeking the Path of Peace

 Peace can be very elusive for me.  The idea of "peace like a river" (Isaiah 66: 12) is more like, peace like a dripping faucet to me...Any inconvenience can and will disrupt my peace...and I am tired of living like that.  I don't want to have shaky faith and faulty peace.  I want to let the floodgate of peace to open up and overflow my soul as it continues in a steady stream through whatever life I have left on this Earth...but, how?  How do I find the path to Peace?

As I read a couple of verses tucked in at the end of Luke 1, I notice a tiny word.  The verses are part of Zechariah's song after the birth of his son John.  Zechariah, in his joy, wraps it up saying,

because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.” (Luke 1: 78-79)

What a marvelous picture: the "tender mercy of Our God gives us The Rising Sun, Jesus, to guide us into the path OF peace..."

And that's when I noticed the word of.  I looked at that word, and pondered.  It is a preposition.  I hate English prepositions.  They are a nightmare for people who try to learn this language as adults.  We never truly grasp the essence of prepositions, which are small words that express the relationship between words or phrases or ideas in a sentence.  I have a whole pitch about the complexities of English prepositions that I give my students when we study Spanish prepositions...to put things into perspectives.  Don't worry, I won't go into that here.  

My point is, and I think I have one...that, I think I have been looking at the idea of peace from the wrong perspective.  I've been seeing it as if I need to be on the road to peace...when, in reality, I need to be on the road of Peace.  Do you see the difference?  If you are a native speaker of English, you see it, right?  The word to usually expresses the idea of moving towards something...a destination.  Whereas the word of generally indicates connectedness or the idea of belonging (notice how we can't talk without prepositions LOL).

What do I mean by all these?  Well, I've been focusing on peace as a road to a destination to which I never fully arrive, when, Peace is the Road...the Way.

It is the Path of Peace because Jesus is the all compassing idea behind the entire thing:  He is the Way and He is the Peace and He is in me, so I already have Peace...I just don't recognize Him because I keep looking at it as a thing to be obtained or a place to get to, when, He Is!

He IS the Rising Sun of Heaven who has already come to shine His Light into this world of darkness for those living into the shadows of death, so we finally see that He Is the Path of Peace.  Peace is a Person, the Prince of Peace is here, May the Holy Spirit open up our eyes so we can see Him, give thanks and be assured that He is God and that He is Good, for His Love endures forever!  In the Precious Name of Jesus, who said:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

Let's seek the Path of Peace this Christmas and every day.  May the troubles we have in this world not disrupt the flow, as we hang on to the truth that Jesus is the Way of Peace.  Amen!