Day 26 - Issue 26
Isaiah 26:3 NLT
'You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!'
Simplicity means singular or made up of a single part. This is our faith made up of one single commitment to love God and neighbour. In an increasingly complex world, it appears as though simplicity has been buried beneath a mountain of responsibility.
I can think of friends, a couple who have rent to pay to secure a roof above their heads, both in employment to make ends meet. They have children so their mornings are a literal race against time, dressing, breakfasting and dropping kids at nursery and school before arriving anxious and exhausted in the office; a mad dash that’s repeated at the end of the day. This is just one season of life and those preceding and following all have their challenges.
God recognises contemporary life is an urgent rush in pursuit of seemingly impossible deadlines, yet God invites us to cultivate a calm inner life of prayer. What else can Isaiah have meant? When I entrust my life, in whatever season, to the will of God, I will discover inner tranquillity despite the demands that swirl around me. God’s one, if challenging, request is that I keep my thoughts fixed on him.
This is the simplicity of the Christian message. I need to train my mind constantly to recall that God’s peace is a gift for me. It means that I can engage in all of life’s demands, both chosen and imposed, maintaining an inner peacefulness. This is at the heartbeat of society’s present love affair with ‘mindfulness’. Yet, to live in tranquillity without the author of such peace misses the point! God has promised peace to us once we choose to develop the discipline of thinking of him throughout our challenging day. And when we forget or are overwhelmed with stress, there is no need for self-recrimination. We simply pause, relocate our thoughts and start again. As with every habit, the battle is in the formation. Once established it becomes the hidden source of our inner strength and continuous resilience to the demands our material world makes upon us.
QUESTION: How can you start and end each day with a focus on God?
PRAYER: Lord God, help me walk through each day with you.
