Peace: God’s Presence Despite the Circumstances by Kim Reisman

Scripture Focus:

In that day, everyone in the land of Judah will sing this song: Our city is strong! We are surrounded by the walls of God’s salvation. Open the gates to all who are righteous; allow the faithful to enter. You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you! Trust in the Lord always, for the Lord God is the eternal Rock.

Isaiah 26:1-4

Peace is the product of the certainty of God’s presence despite the circumstances. That’s important enough to repeat:

Peace is the product of the certainty of God’s presence despite the circumstances.

We’ve probably all witnessed this truth at some point. Someone we know is walking through the darkest valley of the shadow of death, yet radiating peace. Another is living in horrendous circumstances that would drive others to madness yet move through the clamor and confusion with quiet strength. And another is pulled in ten different directions – demanding work, a sick spouse, a rebellious teenager. You wonder how they keep from “flying to pieces,” and then you discover why. You know they’re being kept in peace because their mind is stayed on God.

We have a family friend, a Methodist minister’s wife, whose life is the most powerful witness I know of the peace that is the product of the certainty of God’s presence despite the circumstances.

On New Year’s Day, 1991, she and her ten-year-old daughter were headed home from celebrating the Christmas holidays with friends. She missed a turn and decided to take the next road, though it wasn’t familiar to her. She topped a hill to be greeted by a stop sign. She was going too fast to stop and went through the intersection and under the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Her daughter survived with minor lacerations and a mild concussion, but our friend’s spinal cord was injured and she was paralyzed from the neck down. There were broken ribs and a punctured lung. In the first week, she had three surgeries. In the beginning, she could only move her eyes.

The doctors told her husband that she would be better off dead; that if she lived, she would be bedridden, ventilator-dependent, and a vegetable. The doctors even told her husband that he was too young to be saddled with an invalid wife and offered “some solutions.” But her husband chose life for her.

The initial few years after the accident were full of pain and struggle, hospitalization, and surgery after surgery. Yet, over time, she was able to graduate to a wheelchair and a neck brace, and with a splint on her wrist she can use a telephone, a computer, and feed herself. A newspaper carried an article about her activity – her speaking in church and ministering in all sorts of imaginative ways. In a letter to my father, she described her life:

My family is like any other family. We shop, go to movies, eat out, and take vacations. I’m still a quadriplegic. But by God’s grace I’m also a pastor’s wife, a mother, a registered nurse (inactive), a Certified Lay Speaker in our church, a Sunday school teacher, and an active member of United Women in Faith. I continue to pray for physical healing, but I’m also aware of the great spiritual healing God has done in me and through me. His hand has been in my life throughout this journey. I know because I hold on to it and “walk” with God every day.

How aware are you of God’s presence in your life? As you fast and pray this week, bring to your mind a time when you felt forsaken or alone or abandoned – maybe it was an illness, or the death of a loved one, or a failure or loss of a friendship or job. In reflecting on that experience, did you feel God’s presence? How did you experience God’s presence? Even though, then, you may not have felt and acknowledged God’s presence, are the signs, in retrospect that God was there – present and working?

I will be praying that you would cultivate a keen sense of God’s presence and that you would experience the peace that comes from the certainty that God is with us despite the circumstances.