Blessed are the peacemakers

Our class lesson hits the above Beatitude this week. Peace is a wide-ranging subject, and one with which many Christians struggle. By the way, this beatitude is not about peace-keeping; it is about having peace in one's life and helping others to have it too.
Angela Thomas says that before we can become a peacemaker, we must become a peace processor. That is, we spend time thinking about it, reading about it, and praying about it. "To become a woman of peace, you have to drag your dehydrated heart into the presence of God and ask him for his peace." Phil. 4:5-7 says the same thing. In the same verses, The Message defines peace as a "sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good." And when we sense this, that will settle us down and displace worry.

I am not a pessimistic person, but I do struggle with anxiousness. I struggle with wanting to know outcomes before they appear--with impatience. My prayer is, "Lord, I want to know how this comes out, and I want to know it NOW." But Jesus says in John 16:33, "In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

Now if I could just remember that when the ogre of worry appears.

One World

The last book I featured was Mem Fox's Whoever You Are, illustrated by Leslie Staub.

This beautifully illustrated picture book shows very graphically and poetically that God made us one all over the world. The recurring refrain is "whoever you are, wherever you are, all over the world." The pages that were especially pointed to me were the ones that said, "joys are the same, love is the same, pain is the same, blood is the same...." Several pictures contain Muslim children including a double-page spread of a Muslim school.

Each page is framed with gold, embedded with colored jewels. I suppose the going word is multiculturalism, but the content is something we all need to learn.