A Road Less Travelled

Last night at Tuesday Night Dinner (also known as Wednesday Night Dinner on Tuesday) a discussion broke out about ‘christian’ words, and what they mean the way people really talk. I thought of this again this morning as I was trying to formulate an update on twitter.

See, this morning I woke up in the middle a rather pleasant dream about watching cartoons with a friend and being on the brink of a debate about how good a certain TV show really was. On waking I discovered that I’d overslept, I still had the headache I’d gone to sleep with, and James and Theresa were both going to be leaving for an indeterminate amount of time because of a complicated process involving getting James to work, the van to the shop, and buying water and groceries.

After beginning to get moving on the day, I paused to try to update the world as to my day via Twitter. I started to give the ‘I don’t feel like doing this’ update, which was true, but I wasn’t as miserable as that would have sounded. Because despite being tired, headachey, and not feeling like doing this day or the trip coming up, somehow everything was okay underneath all that.

Then I thought, aha, this is the time for that Christian word ‘peace’. But I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘I don’t feel like doing this but I’m peaceful about it’. Refer back to point two of Stuff I’ve Learned. Peace shouldn’t sound like an emotion to us, but it does. I don’t mean ‘I feel peaceful about today’. I mean, ‘Father, I can’t handle today, but You’ve brought me through worse, so it will be okay that it’s not okay.’.

So, that’s my working definition of peace for right now: “it’s okay that it’s not okay”. It needs some work, but it’s the best I’ve got for right now. So I guess that will just have to be okay.