When Peace Is a Choice

Paul is pragmatic here in a way we often overlook. He does not say: be at peace with all men. He says: as much as lies in you — acknowledging that peace is not always achievable from your side alone. Sometimes it takes two, and the other person may not want it. What Paul does require is that we bring our full willingness.

Peace is frequently a choice. Not a feeling that descends, but a decision we make about how we will orient ourselves — toward reconciliation rather than resentment, toward release rather than revenge, toward the gentleness of someone who has themselves received enormous grace.

This is hard. Especially when we have been wronged. Especially when the chaos in our lives has a human face attached to it — someone who hurt us, who left, who chose themselves over us. The peace of God does not require us to pretend that did not happen. But it does, eventually, ask us to choose not to be defined by it.

Choosing peace over agitation, reconciliation over resentment, is not weakness. It is the most demanding possible form of strength — the strength that comes from being so deeply secured in God's love that you do not need the other person to capitulate before you can be okay.

This is one of the ways that internal peace becomes external practice. The peace that God has built into us — through twenty-six days of honest work — now has somewhere to go. It becomes the peace we choose to extend outward, toward the people and situations that are most difficult.

As much as lies in you. What lies in you, today, toward peace?