Dear friend,
Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, I give to you. Don’t let your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.
I keep thinking about how being hurt by a church does something specific. It is not the same as a bad day at work or a friend letting you down. It is a wound with God's name near it, so it reaches further in than most things do. I know that from the inside. There was a year I could not walk into a building with a cross on it without my chest going tight, and nobody around me could explain why I flinched at hymns I used to love.
John 14 has been on me lately, the part where Jesus tells the disciples He is leaving them peace, and He says plainly that it is not the kind the world hands out. That distinction matters to me this week. The world's peace usually means nothing bad happened yet. His peace was offered to people about to watch everything fall apart, Him included. It was not a promise that institutions would behave. It was something steadier underneath the wreckage of what people do to each other.
I do not think that peace erases what happened to you or asks you to go back inside a room that hurt you. What would it look like for you to let that peace sit next to the anger instead of replacing it?
A prayer
God, the wound has Your name near it and that makes it heavier. Reach past what people did in Your name and let Your own peace, the kind that holds even when things break, find her tonight. Amen.