Peace Like a River

As I’m writing this article at my eldest daughter’s home in Michigan, the view out the wall of floor to ceiling windows is totally awesome.  We are high on a bluff, overlooking a river that is shimmering and sparkling and dancing in the sunlight.    The river is journeying between banks of trees that are bursting out in a glorious spring testimony of color to their Creator.  The constant gentle flow of the bubbly water elicits such a feeling of peace and brings to mind the verse in Isaiah 66:12, “I will extend peace to her like a river.”

I, too, am on a journey – a new journey of life without Steven by my side.  For eighteen years, our lives were centered around the brain injury and did not include pleasures that some take for granted……travel to children’s out-of-state homes, vacations, eating out, going to the beach, even simple things like soaking in a tub or leisurely shopping for clothes or home furnishings.  So it is a bit like I have stepped into a new country.  I miss Steven, but I am also enjoying this new life.  I am content.  I am at peace.

  However…..thinking of life before the Lord took Steven home, I look back on most days also filled with this same peace, especially after the Lord helped Steven work through the anger and trauma of the brain injury.  It again amazes me as I ponder how God built into each of us the exact ingredients we would need to deal with whatever He chose to allow to come through His hand to us.  It brings tears to my eyes as I think of the peace that filled Steven, especially in the last few years as he eventually lost all movement and even the small amount of speech that he previously had.

This peace and contentment, though, is NOTHING aside of what Steven is experiencing right now.  I just finished reading “The Martyr’s Song” by Ted Dekker.  Mr. Dekker writes about an old priest suffering unbelievable anguish from evil men.  The priest is given a vision of another horizon, a heavenly horizon coexisting with the priest’s current torture.  Ted Dekker talks about the “song of love” hummed by a shimmering figure walking toward the old priest in this new heavenly horizon.  He states:  “Oh, the music.  The children’s laughter rode the skies, playing off the man’s song. . . now others seemed to have joined in to form a chorus.  Or maybe it just sounded like a chorus but was really just laughter.
                       Sing, O son of Zion; Shout, O child of mine;
                       Rejoice with all your heart and soul and mind.
 . . .the giggling children sang with him [the shimmering man] in perfect harmony now.  A symphony slowly swelling. The melody begged him to join.  To leap into the field and throw his arms up and dance with laughter along with the hidden children.”

The peace and contentment and joy that we will one day experience is so far, far above this “peace like a river” that I am currently experiencing looking out my daughter’s window over the river bluff.  It is eons above any peace or contentment or joy that we earthlings could ever imagine.  It will shimmer and leap and explode and flow over us with intoxicating power, reaching into our chests and squeezing our hearts and bubbling through our minds.  Halleluiah!  Praise God for the joy that is to come!