on telling the whole truth of our stories
For those of us who are awake and aware of our stories—those we’ve been born into and those that have taken shape over the course of our lives—we can sometimes feel a sense of unrest, frenetic energy, a lack of peace—especially in the waiting season of Advent.
Naming the complexities and allowing yourself to speak plainly about what your stories have held— joy and delight, ache and disappointment, moments of clarity and lingering questions—is deeply courageous work. We don’t like to enter the hard parts and we quite often want to rationalize them away.
But truthfully naming the whole of it simply allows what is real to be acknowledged before God.
This week’s Advent theme is peace. Peace often begins to take root in this kind of honesty. When the whole story is spoken—without rushing, without shrinking, without compromising—and when it is received with compassion, your heart is freed from carrying it alone. Truth creates space for you to recognize where God has been present, steady, and attentive, even when circumstances felt confusing and arduous.
As you and I open ourselves up to the Lord in the way the psalmists do, we are brought ever so gently (and sometimes over time) back into the peace that God offers us. The Spirit hovers over the chaos; the Son enters into it; the Father works to redeem and repair it. And as you continue telling the truth before God, you participate in the redemptive work of letting Him bring shalom into the story you are living.
The more I read about and study shalom, the more I realize its complicatedness. Shalom here on earth is not tidy. It does not wrap itself up in a bow and present itself without pain or disease. Shalom is peace, yes, but it is more than that and it is not the absence of difficulty. Shalom is more than healing, too. And oh, don’t I long for healing? The shalom God invites me to is a kind of honest, truthful, complete wholeness, and on this side of glory, I won’t fully experience it as the true and complete flourishing that I am meant to. But, in the midst of life’s chaotic and scary storms, I can experience the peace of Christ who commands the waves that rock me in the midst of the stories I’m living.
This Advent season, may you know the deep peace of the Son of Peace.
