PEACE OVER CHAOS
Christmas, although it’s an exciting time, can also be a great opportunity to distract ourselves from normal life or any hardships we’re facing. The busyness of decorating the house, buying everyone's Christmas presents, rushing around trying to see all your family, is the perfect time to steal our attention away from what’s truly going on in our hearts.
I don’t know about you but I’m very good at keeping myself busy so that I can avoid certain things. One of the ways I do this is through reading. Often I’ll start reading before I go to sleep and the next thing I know it’s 2am and I didn’t even notice. But it’s because I can get so invested in the characters and the story that it turns into a way to escape and avoid the storms that life throws at us.
The last few months, everything in my life has been pointing towards peace. All the messages I’ve heard, worship I've listened to, and even social media posts I've seen have been centred around peace. And as this kept popping up in the most random situations, I knew it had to be God speaking into my life.
As everyone around me kept talking about peace all I could think was I feel the exact opposite of peace in my life right now. My mind felt chaotic. And I was covering it up with distractions of Christmas shopping, and all the preparations that Christmas brings, but once that’s over and you're settled in for Christmas the realisation set in that I was withholding peace from myself by holding onto things that God never intended for me to carry.
1 Peter 5:7 says
“Cast all your anxiety onto him because he cares for you”
Whatever your clinging to whether it be; anger, hurt, loss, God never intended for you to carry it on your own. In fact he tells us to CAST it onto Him.
Peace isn’t something that you have to wait for, it’s there in abundance for you to take. Once you let go of what you're gripping to, that's when true peace will fill your heart. I imagine it to be like a weight being lifted off my shoulders and replaced with God’s everlasting love and peace.
Exodus 14:14 says
“The lord will fight for you; you need only be still”.
So as the chaos of Christmas has begun to settle down and the distractions start to dissipate, I want to encourage you to surrender what you’ve been keeping to yourself, or anything that’s been brushed under the carpet. As you give it to God you’ll see your chaos turn into peace.
by Elise Wharton Dec 28th 2022
