Real Peace E-Book

Andy Farmer

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 312

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

From devastating wars to destructive relationships, everyone knows that our world lacks the true and lasting peace we all long for. Yet God has promised us that peace is possible. Andy Farmer, a seasoned pastor and biblical counselor, explores what it means to find true peace—peace with God, peace with each other, and peace with the world. In examining common threats to peace such as stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and conflict, Farmer helps us turn to the God who offers peace to all who seek him. Designed to be accessible for both Christians and non-Christians, Real Peace emphasizes the gospel's foundational role as the source of all true rest and reconciliation, calling readers to join God in the peacemaking project of the cross.

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“Peace, if it comes at all, tends to come in little pieces—the job is stable for now, the kids are healthy today, friends still hang out with you—and sometimes I can settle for those scraps. Thanks, Andy, for showing me how I can honor God by aiming for peace that is much deeper. You let those words of Jesus linger in my soul: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.’”

Edward T. Welch, Faculty and Counselor, CCEF

“There are many books I can recommend on finding peace with God. There are far fewer I can recommend on experiencing the peace of God. Real Peace is a book I highly recommend for real people facing real trouble in a really messed up world. It paints gospel-centered portraits, explaining how to apply John 16:33 in the midst of our struggles with stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and conflict. Reading Real Peace pointed me not to a system, but to a person—the Prince of Peace.”

Robert W. Kellemen, PhD, Executive Director, The Biblical Counseling Coalition; author, Anxiety: Anatomy and Cure

“This is a book about being whole in a broken world, about finding rest amidst chaos within and without. I actually felt peace as I read it, making it a perfect book to read on vacation or on a coffee break in the middle of a stressful day. Filled with charm, personality, and wisdom, Real Peace offers solace to restless Christians and invites non-Christians to know the God of peace.”

Mike Wilkerson, Pastor and Director of Biblical Counseling, Mars Hill Church, Seattle, Washington; author, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry

“We all long for peace in our hostile, chaotic, and seemingly meaningless world. Why? Our souls were created for peace—not mere emotion or experience, but through an abiding relationship with the Prince of Peace. My friend Andy Farmer serves the church and the world well through his deeply thoughtful, winsome, and gospel-orienting work. Through its sociological and soul-revealing insights drawn from the wells of Scripture, Real Peace offers us hope that ‘draws the poison of self and despair’ out of our peace-robbing struggles. Such hope is found only through our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Real Peace is a must read for everyone as we are called into the radical mission of the gospel.”

Robert K. Cheong, Pastor of Care and Counseling, Sojourn Community Church, Louisville, Kentucky; author, God Redeeming His Bride: A Handbook for Church Discipline; contributor, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling

REAL PEACE

Real Peace: What We Long for and Where to Find It

Copyright © 2013 by Andy Farmer

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: David Sacks Photography

First printing 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked niv are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3529-1PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3530-7 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3531-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3532-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farmer, Andy, 1959–

Real peace : what we long for and where to find it / Andy Farmer.

     p.   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3529-1 1. Peace—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

BT736.4.F37        2013

248.8'6—dc23         2012043959

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP      23   22   21   20   19   18   17   16   15  14   13 15   14   13   12   11   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

In memory of my father, Jake I. Farmer, who taught me to honor the soldier but love the peace that brings him home.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

  1   Peace, and the Problem with It

  2   Is True Peace Possible?

  3   The Prince of Peace

  4   Peace and Stress

  5   Peace and Anxiety

  6   Peace and Grief

  7   Peace and Depression

  8   Peace and Conflict

  9   Peace and God’s People

10   Peace and My World

Appendix: Peace and...

Notes

Acknowledgments

IT’S BEEN A PERSONALLY rewarding experience to write this book. But that experience has only been possible with the help and support of others. I would like to express my deep gratefulness to those whose help and encouragement have made this an adventure in learning and not just a project to be done.

This book would not have been written without the counsel and support of my friend and fellow pastor Dave Harvey. For close to twenty years in ministry together, he has challenged my thinking and application of truth and encouraged me to get hold of something worth writing about and then to write about it. This book simply wouldn’t exist without him.

I would also like to thank the people of Covenant Fellowship Church and particularly the men on the pastoral team (past and present) who have been my friends and my community for what is now most of my life. Some of you have read and offered valuable input on these chapters. But all of you have taught me how to live out peace and nurture it in the details of life.

I’d like to thank the staff at Crossway—specifically Justin, Tara, Jill, and James—who have made the process of bringing this project into print a true joy.

There are several folks who were gracious enough to allow their stories to be woven into the content of Real Peace. I’m humbled by those who have been mentioned by name in the chapters for allowing me to build my thoughts with the vivid help of their experiences.

To my family—Emily and Ben, Melissa and Leo, Kelsey, Grant (and the three little ones who will wonder why Pops didn’t include any pictures)—thank you for your enthusiasm for this book and for making room around our busy house for me to find peaceful places to write.

Thank you Jill, my treasure and my delight in this world and my eternal friend in the next. Everything I am or do is in some way made better by who you are in my life.

And thank you Jesus, for the peace that passes understanding, and the opportunity to share it with others.

Introduction

THE INITIAL IDEA FOR this book came to me as I stared at a picture. It wasn’t a beautiful Caribbean beach scene, or a pristine Alpine meadow. It was a picture of a horse. Running. Down the homestretch of a big race. With thousands of people screaming as he churned up the track. Not exactly the idyllic scene you think would inspire a book on peace. Let me try to explain.

The horse is Secretariat, the legendary thoroughbred who won horse racing’s Triple Crown in 1973. Secretariat happens to be my favorite athlete of all time, species notwithstanding. As a fourteen-year-old I somehow got caught up in the national hoopla over the Triple Crown run. I watched each race with rapt attention, spellbound by the effortless grace and power that seemed to flow out of him as he set records in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes.

The picture I’m referring to is a famous photo of “Big Red” closing out his Triple Crown with his historic Belmont run. My wife got it for me and had it signed by the jockey, Ron Turcotte, and the photographer who took the shot. Secretariat is running along the rail in full stride toward the finish line. But there’s an odd thing about the picture. The horse and his rider are virtually alone in the shot. Secretariat won the Belmont by a mind-boggling thirty-one lengths (over eighty yards)—setting a world record for the distance that still stands. Turcotte said afterward, “I was just along for the ride.” Think about it like this: with no competition and no urging from his jockey, my favorite athlete ran faster than any horse has ever run a mile and a half in history. In fact, his quarter times show that he was actually speeding up as he crossed the finish line!

I was looking at the picture one day, and I noticed something I’d never seen before. At full speed in front of thousands of people, the horse seems absolutely calm. I looked for any sign of stress and couldn’t see anything. It dawned on me—he’s running just for the fun of it. I was watching an animal do what he was created to do, do it with amazing beauty, and do it with what seemed like pure joy. I thought to myself, “That’s peace. I need me some of that.”

So I began to study the idea of peace in the Bible. In that process I discovered a second reason to write this book. I had a hard time finding anything written on peace in all its biblical aspects. I could find excellent books on our reconciliation with God through the cross, but they said very little about peace in the day-to-day experiences of life. I found some books on the experience of peace, but there wasn’t much connection to the gospel in them. As I looked for helpful resources on how to do peace in the world, I found myself in the world of liberal theology, again with little if any gospel connections. I thought if I could write something that was biblical and gospel-centered, it might start conversations that don’t seem to be happening much right now.

The thing that pushed me to actually do this, however, was my experience in pastoral counseling and care. As I studied peace, I became much more attuned to how people I was meeting with related to it. I began to realize that nearly everyone I talked to, regardless of their situation, was thirsting for something like peace in their lives. Whether they use the actual word or not, embedded in the language people use to describe their life struggles is a desperate cry for peace. This is abundantly obvious with the people I talk to who don’t claim a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. Even among Christians who are not in difficult struggles, the lack of peace is real. I had a friend ask me today what I was writing on, and when I told her it was peace, she simply sighed, “Ahh . . . I’d love that.”

That’s my hope in writing this book. That you’ll learn to love peace like I’m learning to love peace. Peace in all its dimensions. Let me offer some tips on how to read this book. My best suggestion is to start at the beginning; that’s how I wrote it. But you could also look through the table of contents for a chapter that might speak to your immediate sense of need. You’ll find application for peace in the normal stress of life (chap. 4) and also for some difficult struggles like anxiety, grief, depression, and conflict (chaps. 5–8). My hope is that if you get something out of one of those chapters, you might then want to read from the beginning.

Nearly every New Testament letter begins with a greeting that includes a blessing of peace.1 As you begin this book, let me extend that blessing as well. May you read and be enriched with peace. Like my favorite athlete, may we learn how to run our races at peace, finding unexpected joy in doing what we were created and redeemed to do. Or as the New Testament authors tend to say it, “May grace and peace be multiplied to you” (2 Pet. 1:2), through what you read in the pages to come.

1

Peace, and the Problem with It

DO YOU EVER HAVE moments in life when everything seems right? I experienced one of those moments, sitting alone on a virtually deserted beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was the end of the afternoon on a cloudless day—my favorite time to be on the beach. I gazed out toward sets of curling waves coming in from an endless horizon. Rays from the late summer sun bouncing off the ocean cast the water in a metallic blue sheen. There was just enough breeze to fill my senses with the aroma of the ocean, which is to me always the aroma of vacation. I had nowhere to go, no one to talk to, nothing to do but sit and enjoy the solitude. And let my mind drift on the gentle tide of peace.

Somewhere in my tranquil mental meanderings the thought came: “This is almost perfect. But what if I were in Maui?” Now, I’ve never been to Maui, but I have to think it’s just a little better than the barrier islands of North Carolina. I’ve been told that there are no bugs on the beach in Maui—which reminded me that in a little while hordes of mosquitoes would be descending on me. Tiki huts with refreshing fruit drinks (which I suppose dot the Maui beach) were nowhere to be seen. I imagined that the sand in Maui didn’t stick to your feet like it does on the Atlantic Coast. Somewhere in the mist of the surf I began to detect the distinct aroma of dead fish. Bummer.

As a rising tide of grumbling began to engulf me, I was hit by a wave of guilt. What kind of pampered American am I that I can sit here and complain about this almost perfect moment, when most of the world can’t even afford to be here? Someday this is going to be nothing more than a toxic wasteland because people like me go on vacation and don’t separate their trash. I’m a lousy person. Of course, being a Christian, I had to factor in the God element. Here I sit by myself with the God of the universe, the Creator of all that I’m enjoying, and he is willing to open his heart to me. Yet the only thing on my mind is the lack of a convenient Tiki bar. I’m not just a lousy human, I’m a lousy Christian too.

There was nothing left to do at that point but pick up my chair and trudge back to the house murmuring, “Man, peace is hard find.”

Is peace hard to find in your world? Can you mark even a single moment in your life and say, “That was peaceful”? My guess is that a lot of people can identify with my brief encounter with peace. We have those fleeting experiences when the circumstances around us and our inner state come into an almost mystical alignment and we experience that sense of “Ah, so this is what it’s meant to be.” It could be fifteen minutes when the kids are actually playing nicely and we can sit and catch our breath because nothing needs to be done right now. Or maybe it’s those glorious times at the end of school finals when the pressure is off and the next semester is still a week away. What brings peace to you? There are thousands of little moments in our lives where we taste peace. But they don’t last, do they? How many times have we been in that peaceful place but couldn’t enjoy it because we were preoccupied with to-dos, or frustrated by something that happened earlier that day? It seems really hard to get our moods in line with our moments. Try as we might to get things just right, we don’t control the things that make for peace. We don’t control the weather, the traffic, flu season, sibling rivalry, lost wallets, cancelled flights, bosses that need “one more thing before you take off.” Life seems to work against any sustained sense of order and tranquility. Peace is hard to find.

That’s why I’m writing this book. I believe we have a peace problem. But the problem is felt much deeper than simply the limits of vacations to deliver as hoped. As a pastor I am dealing daily with people in profound life struggles. Marriages can become pitched battles of bitterness. Families are in chaos as teens and parents push each other to the brink of open hostility, and beyond. Men and women fall into gaping wells of depression. Some live in the hopeless grip of grief. Fears torment people in the sleepless shadows of night. As I have counseled and talked to people over the years, every struggle I’ve seen seems to contain one common problem: the absence, or loss, of peace.

That peace is hard to find shouldn’t be a surprise. Peace is the elusive human goal. Isn’t that what religion is for? To believe and practice religion faithfully is to pursue and hope to achieve whatever form of peace a particular religious tradition holds out—whether it be an inner tranquility, a oneness with the universe, a higher state, or a divine reward. But religion doesn’t hold the patent on peace. Every secular utopia has had as its end goal a society of peace. People say that what the world needs is love. But why do we need love? Because if we love each other, we can all have peace. As important as love is, the end goal is peace.

Maybe the great futility of the human condition is that the thing that has been most sought after has been least experienced. In fact, the common denominator of all cultures throughout time is not the experience of peace but the reality of war. It would be safe to say there has never been a day in human history where world peace has truly been found. Somewhere in the world, there is conflict going on; it’s always been that way. It has been well observed: Peace is that brief glorious moment when everybody stands around reloading.

What can be said of societies and cultures can be said of individuals as well. No person has made it through life fully at peace with himself or others. I’ll talk about why later. Even those we generally cede to have found peace, the Francis of Assisis and Gandhis and Mother Theresas of the world, have been acutely aware of the inner turmoil of their souls. They viewed themselves as pursuers of peace, not possessors of it. There is a universal human quest for peace and a universal human failure to find it. And this begs the question, what really is peace? And why is it so hard to find?

Peace, and the Problem with It

If you check out the dictionary, you’ll see that peace is generally defined as an absence of conflict, more specifically an absence of war. In other words, it is known by what it isn’t. So, dictionarially speaking, if you are not currently in an Apache helicopter dodging RPGs, you’re supposedly at peace. Enjoy!

But the absence of active war in our immediate surroundings doesn’t mean we have found peace. Life is full of relational conflicts, racial and ethnic tensions, hurtful misunderstandings, and injustices against us. Then there are just the day-to-day irritations of living around other people who don’t understand that their greatest joy in life should be valuing our personal space. Even if we get some momentary cooperation with our fellow man, there is enough chaos within us to make life feel like war.

Try this experiment. Google “psychological peace.” Then Google “mental peace.” Now, “psychological” and “mental” are generally synonymous in our language. Psychological health and mental health are two ways of talking about the same thing. But if you Google psychological peace and then mental peace, you’ll find few, if any, common hits. “Psychological peace” will put you into the world of peace psychology, an academic discipline that has to do with how people cope with violence and war. Your search on mental peace will drop you into New Age and all manner of Eastern and quasimystical life paths. The definition of peace even defies the Internet.

What is peace, practically speaking? Let me give you some contrasts that seem to make up the common range of what we mean when we say the word peace.

Harmony rather than hostility. One of the most common words used to describe the positive aspect of peace is harmony. It’s a great word, because harmony implies that there are different things that could function separately, but all are made better because they are together. Musical harmony is multiple notes played together in a chord. Harmony values the individual contribution to a greater whole. There is something about things working together for the benefit of all that seems like peace.

But harmony isn’t the norm in life. We live in a hostile world. Things tend to grind against each other. Schedules work against spontaneity. Plaids work against stripes. Progress works against nature. Diversity works against unity. Power works against justice.

The American Deep South of the early nineteenth century was a remarkably stable culture. There was a simple reason for it. There were slaves and nonslaves. But that is not social harmony. There is no peace in stability imposed by racial or ethnic tyranny. I grew up in the Deep South during the civil rights era as a dominant culture white kid. On the surface we were not racists. But we lived in the dying throes of legal racial segregation. In many ways I was oblivious to the deep hostility that racial subjugation had produced. White people had peace with black people because we had our place and our stuff and they had their place and their stuff. But I gradually learned that segregation was not peace producing—especially if our place and stuff were nicer, and better maintained and more accessible than black people’s stuff. What I learned to appreciate about Dr. Martin Luther King was his extraordinary vision of peace. He knew that simply changing the status quo wouldn’t produce peace. He saw the moral need for justice for the oppressed. He called the country to account for its own laws and documents that guaranteed equality and opportunity for all people. But his vision of peace moved beyond the righting of wrongs to a society where hostility itself would crumble under the hammering of justice. King fought for justice and equality, but his dream was for a unity amid diversity that justice and equality could achieve.

Something in us loves harmony and wants to strive for it. Harmony defies the great barriers to peace: hostility, isolation, and subjugation. Harmony values the individual contribution and the unity of the whole at the same time. Harmony happens when members of a team make their highest goal the success of the team, whether that’s on the field or in the factory. We taste harmony when our families all pitch in to clean out the garage and no one complains. Harmony is the resonant chord of peace in our souls.

Order rather than chaos. Keeping with the musical metaphor, my wife and I went to the orchestra a while back. The concert hall in Philadelphia, the city where we live, has an affordable section of seats behind the orchestra. So that’s where we sat. I ended up really enjoying the seats because we got to see things that the normal concert goers don’t see. For example, we got to see the conductor’s face as he led the orchestra. I couldn’t hear any mistakes in the playing, but I could tell when they happened because of the evil-eye stare the conductor would shoot at an unfortunate musician from time to time. Using opera glasses enabled me to look at the actual scores on the music stands. Sometimes I could even follow the notes as a musician was playing them.

The orchestra debuted a new concerto by a contemporary composer that could generously be called “dissonant.” I don’t mind some tension in music, but this piece sounded like a twenty-minute slow-motion car wreck. I got bored, so I began to survey the stage with my binoculars. I noticed one music stand with what seemed to be a blank page of music. (I’ve learned that this means that it’s break time for the musician until the next movement.) At the top of the page was printed, “page intentionally left blank.” Scribbled onto the page by the musician was the comment “like the composer’s brain.” I now like classical music much better.

It turns out that this piece was not really bad. It was intentionally chaotic. It was the composer’s intent to create something that disrupted the sensibilities of the audience and the orchestra—to disturb the peace. Appreciating any unfamiliar art will require the disturbance of our comfortable perspective. Some art is intentionally chaotic. In this sense it portrays unsettling realities and provokes uncomfortable emotions. That doesn’t mean it has to be pornographic or vulgar in its content. In fact, the art that best unsettles our sense of order usually does it in ways we can’t describe. It gets under our skin, or in our ears and eyes, and pries open the Tupperware lids of our airtight worldview. It confronts us with chaos.

But we can’t live like that. We’re not wired for chaos. Those who seek to live for chaos flame out in it. They lose their moral and relational bearings. We survive in life by ordering it. Even artists who depict chaos consider order. They take images, materials, and ideas and arrange them in an order with the intent of upsetting our order. But art couldn’t do that to us if we didn’t value order in the first place. Order in the best sense of the word means security and continuity. It allows us to place trust in something today that we can be confident will be trustworthy tomorrow. Not all of us pursue order the same way. Some folks have a place for everything and everything in its place. Others get along fine with, “If I need it, I know how to find it.” But look closely at anyone’s life, and you’ll find habits, routines, and systems that bring order out of chaos and provide a sense of peace.

Fullness rather than emptiness. What interrupted my sense of peace in the Outer Banks was an awareness that I lacked something. I lacked Maui. To have peace means that we can’t have a sense of lack. To put it positively, it means we have to be full. Not full as in “stuffed,” but full as in, “I’m not aware of anything that I don’t have that would improve what I do have.”

Think about this for a second. What would a truly full life, in the best sense of the word, mean for you? Let me take a stab at it for myself. A full life would mean that I have things in balance. It would mean that I have a house that is big enough and nice enough to really enjoy, but that I don’t have to spend all my time and money trying to keep it nice. In my relationships fullness would mean that I have enough close friends that I never feel lonely or misunderstood, but not so many relationships that I feel guilty because I can’t keep up with everybody. A full day would include waking up after a great night’s sleep and looking ahead to being busy, but never being stressed out. I would be productive with my time, but also enjoy what I was doing. At the end of the day I would feel a sense of satisfaction that what I did that day counted for something beyond just toil. I could rest that night happy with myself. And I would look into the future with confidence that the days to come wouldn’t just be same old, same old. There would be new adventures to experience, new sensations to be felt, new knowledge to obtain. I would be growing like a tree grows, never weak, always getting stronger.

But fullness is elusive. In one sense I wake up every morning wanting to be full, but having a chronic awareness of emptiness. I have a good house, but it needs work, and I am not particularly good at the work it needs. I have lots of friends, but they don’t always understand me the way I want to be understood; and I have a sneaking suspicion that they don’t appreciate me the way I want to be appreciated. I wake up in the morning earlier than I’d like because I tend to stay up longer than I should. I have the greatest job in the world, but stress is a daily part of it. Life is busy and complicated, and I’m running way behind. The future? The only thing I know is that I’m growing older, slower, less attractive, and less able to do things that I used to do without thinking, stretching, or medicating beforehand.

Now, I would put myself in the “more full than empty” category. But I know that isn’t the experience of most people. The world is filled with emptiness. Most people around the globe have no hope of ever attaining the basic food, freedom, health, and opportunity that I take for granted. I know this. Even in my affluent culture there is alarming physical poverty. Among the haves like me, there is still pervasive poverty of hope, of meaning, and of soul.

True peace can’t be compatible with a sense of emptiness. You won’t be able to say, “I have peace, but what I really need is . . .” With peace comes fullness.

Settling for Peace Substitutes

In words like harmony, order, and fullness I’ve tried to capture what most people want when they say they want peace. If somebody offered you a free week of harmony, order, and fullness, would you take it? Would there be anything else you would need during that week? Chances are you can’t picture what a week like that would feel like. Peace is something we’ve learned not to expect in life. So we learn to settle for substitutes, knock-off versions that give us the illusion that we have the real thing.

If we can’t have harmony, we’ll settle for tolerance. One of the words you’ll hear whenever the issue of social relationships comes up these days is tolerance. There are tolerance policies in the workplace. Children are taught the necessity of tolerance toward their classmates. Tolerance is the way people who don’t naturally get along find a way to coexist. When tolerance is used in a technical sense, it addresses how much variation between opposing things is permissible before problems happen. Tolerance means by definition that true harmony is not possible. Culturally speaking, tolerance is what happens when everything and everyone has to be equal all the time. We have to tolerate our differences, not reconcile them or harmonize them. In a tolerant society we give each other space—to a limit. But the best tolerance can do is keep tension at manageable levels. It will never deliver harmony.

For a period of my life following college, I worked in a department with two other people, a radical feminist and a gay man. They knew I was a Christian, and I don’t think they knew what to do with me. As the new guy I tried to fit in as best I could, but it was obvious I didn’t fit their familiar categories. In order to preserve a productive work environment, I think they chose a tolerance policy toward me as a person. Tolerance avoided the uncomfortable differences between us. But their tolerance ultimately felt patronizing and demeaning to me. I would have preferred they say they didn’t really agree with what “people like me” stood for. At least I would have had the opportunity to try to express myself in ways they could understand, and they could have done the same with me. To be honest, I think I was OK settling for tolerance myself. Tolerance preserved a comfortable status quo. We were able to work with relative cooperation on a superficial level, as long as we didn’t talk about our differences. I don’t think any of us were enriched as people by the self-protective social walls we built in the name of tolerance.

If we can’t have order, we’ll wrestle for control. Here is something funny about people. We live in a world we can’t control and then spend all our lives trying to tame it or keep it from taming us. There’s a word for that—futility. Futility is believing we can control uncontrollable things. My favorite expression for futility is “herding cats.” If you’ve never noticed, cats don’t do herds. Just for fun I tried herding barn cats once at my parents’ farm. It doesn’t work—I know they’re smart, but they just don’t seem to get the whole leadership/teamwork thing. I thought I had gotten a handle on it at one point when they were in one spot in my parents’ shed and there was only one way in or out. I wanted to see if I could move them all together from that spot to another spot. So I (humanely) dropped a pan on the floor behind them to see if I could scare them out in the same direction. One found the escape route and took off. But this apparently eliminated that option for two others. One shot up the side of the wall heading no place in particular. The other just ran around in circles. Conclusion? Herding cats—impossible. There are some things we just can’t control.

One common tendency I come across in people I counsel is a craving for control. Angry people are angry because they can’t control people and circumstances around them. Fearful people are fearful because things around them are constantly exerting controlling pressure on them. Lazy people and escapist people are doing all they can to avoid things that try to control them. Obsessive people are consumed with trying to manage or clean things that won’t stay managed or clean. We spend life herding any cats within reach and then wonder why we’re stressing and freaking out with the effort. We’ve bought into the illusion of control. And there’s no peace in that.

If we can’t have fullness, we’ll pursue indulgence. My wife Jill and I have realized over the years that “dinner dates” aren’t our thing. It’s not because we don’t love good food. In fact, dinner dates are a problem because we love good food too much. When we go to a nice restaurant, we have no self control. Everything on the menu looks good, so we order way too much. We inhale bread and salad like black holes inhale galaxies. Stimulating conversation over carefully timed courses of a meal? No time—waiter, can’t you see my plate’s empty? By the time we get to dessert, we don’t even want it, but let’s get two. We’re home from our dinner date in about an hour, stuffed beyond any capacity to function as a romantic couple, good only for the couch and a movie.

I don’t think that’s the intent of a good restaurant experience. To do it right is to experience fullness, not (in Jill’s lingo) “bloatation.”

If I’m brutally honest, I can take my tendencies with restaurants and see them play out all over my life. Enough is never really enough when more is possible. The way I express myself is through how I indulge and what I consume. I don’t think I’m alone in this. During the economic downturn that began in 2008, Congress passed a stimulus package directed at jumpstarting the economy. Republican Leader John Boehner lauded the passage of the bill with these patriotic words: “The sooner we get this relief in the hands of the American people, the sooner they can begin to do their job of being good consumers.”1

Apparently, to be an American is to be a good consumer. But what makes a good consumer? Indulgence. Indulgence is the refusal to live with just enough. I can’t just have all my favorite classic rock artists on my MP3 player. I need their entire catalogs, including all the tracks that weren’t worth releasing back when the original album came out. But I don’t just need more, I need new . . . and special . . . and . . . deluxe . . . and customized. Why? Recent psychological studies show that people who struggle with a lack of self-esteem or a sense of powerlessness tend to bolster themselves by purchasing things that give them a feeling that they are better than they feel.2 The popular term for this is retail therapy, and it highlights the snare of indulgence. Indulgence isn’t about enjoying what we have; it is about the obsession with what we don’t have. When indulgence drives us, we will never experience fullness. No matter what we get, there is an insatiable craving for more.

Tolerance rather than harmony. Control rather than order. Indulgence rather than fullness. The goal of this book is to help us move away from whatever we depend on in life to make up for the peace we lack. But we need some basic comprehension of peace that can satisfy us enough to seek it. And as we’ve seen in this chapter, that isn’t a simple task.

Is Peace Possible? The Experts Weigh In

In the interest of thorough research, I took some time to look up what really wise and smart people have said about peace. Using actual quotes found on relatively reliable websites, I pulled together a virtual think tank to get some answers. Let me set the imaginary scene.