Peace - Day 5

Read Psalm 121

Again, I find the words of Eugene Peterson instructive:

Do you think the way to tell the story of the Christian journey is to describe its trials and tribulations?  It is not.  It is to name and to describe God who preserves, accompanies and rules us.

All the water in the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside.  Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us. ... The only serious mistake we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God has gotten bored looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that God has become disgusted with our meanderin obedience and decided to let us fend for ourselves  for a while, or that God has gotten too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle East to take time now to sort out the complicated mess we have gotten ourselves into.  That is the only serious mistake we can make.  It is the mistake that Psalm 121 prevents: the mistake of supposing that God’s interest in us waxes and wanes in response to our spiritual temperature...Psalm 121 says that the same faith that works in the big things works in the little things.  The God of Genesis 1 who brought light out of darkness is also the God of this day who guards you from every evil.  (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, 2d edition, 2000 InterVarsity Press, 43-44).