Creating Peace In The Chaos

I haven’t really slept for the last two nights since we moved into our house. I haven’t found out how to rest here. I usually just lay there, aware of my children, lovely wife and my dog all bunked up in this living room with 4 fans and an a/c all working in unison to keep us cool and eliminate the need for a noise machine that we normally have running. It’s quite a loud room but the noise is a familiar restful one from my childhood. Fans….Loud fans….all on high.

I’ve got to say, I love being this close to these people. Erika and the kids all bunked up in the same room. Seeing them sleeping, and at peace causes my heart to swell with affection and a compulsion rises in me to fight for them. To create a sanctuary from this chaos of a house that we just bought. That they would have a place where they can prosper, thrive and live a vibrant life. That they could feel rooted after so many years of transience….but right now, it’s not time to fight. It’s time to rest…..but my mind wants to make a better world for them and so it kicks into overdrive trying to engineer solutions for the mountain of problems that stand between us and a restful home…..and I think I’m standing watch for the rats that have been here, making sure they don’t come near my sleeping children.

But it’s not time to fight, to stand guard, to understand the problems, to engineer solutions. It’s time to rest.

When this move started, I was presented with a seemingly impossible challenge of removing a roof and roof structure in order to close and be able to have a home. Something that would normally be on the seller to rectify but the state of the market and investors with cash offers praying that we would back out and kick up a stink took away our negotiating power.

Thank God for the church and my father-in-law. We got it done about an hour before closing and we were able to close. We pretty much lived in demolition mode for 3 days in the punishing heat of Central Florida. There was a giant that stood between my family finally owning our home and it had to be destroyed. There’s only one way forward. I would have done it alone if I had to…though it wouldn’t have gotten done in time.

Thank God for the church and family. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was doing. It needed to be done. Thankfully, God sent help.

That element of “it needs to get done and it doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to do it.” Put my thinking-to-doing ratio in an unfamiliar but empowering place where I just did what needed to be done to get us to where we were going. There simply was no time for the luxury of overthinking. There was no time for prayer and meditation at that moment.

The house we were moving out of closed the day after our house closed and our stuff had to be out. It didn’t matter that I could hardly walk after the demolition push. The job had to be done.

It didn’t matter that I’d never successfully backed up a massive trailer before. I just did it anyway and I found that the trick to doing that is just doing it and not thinking about it.

I didn’t know how to do it and I did it anyway.

Now I know how to do it. Because I did it.

So I then moved everything we owned during a torrential downpour that Florida is so good at. I couldn’t risk stopping to ask for help. The clock was ticking and I couldn’t risk losing time to ask for help that may or may not come.

My body ached and throbbed but it would have to just push through. It was a Friday and Shabbat was coming. Rest was coming….but the house wasn’t ready to live in at all. I was already beyond heat exhaustion and a sweltering hot house wasn’t what I needed after a push like this. The rain at least kept me cool after the roof demo.

I put out an SOS to some of our friends and partners asking them to help us fund a few nights in a hotel and thank God that you guys came through for us. It gave us a place to rest after this push and we desperately needed it. We were able to rest on the sabbath and recover some before it picked back up again.

Through the intensity of the push, my head got into a ratio of thinking and doing that landed heavy on the doing side. And though it was very empowering, it was not conducive to the internal peace I now find myself needing in order to make sense of how to proceed with turning this chaos into a sanctuary….and actually sleep when it’s time to sleep.

Prior to this move, God had been teaching me how to live in a constant state of awareness of His presence. I felt His presence more in the every day comings and going’s of life than I did when I spent all my time in prayer rooms. A lot of this came during our 3 years in the desert where He introduced me to the everyday, all the time presence of God and I was able to see Him and hear Him everywhere and in everything. He taught me how to walk in the constant union with Him that He prayed for in John 17.

A lot of that comes through daily meditation and mental focus on His presence and the simplicity of being aware of my body and my surroundings, being mindful that all of it is His habitation. He paid such a high price to be so close to us and I want Him to get what He paid for so I’m learning to enjoy the life He died to give me and rest in the grace He bled to make available to me. Learning to actually believe the good news of what Jesus accomplished for us.

So….back to laying in bed….staring at the ceiling.

By the grace of God I remembered a tool that breaks mental torment. It’s the setting of the mind. It’s mind control. Not the kind that zuck, the media and marketers are putting their hands to but the one where we control our own mind, where we take control of our thoughts and take dominion of our internal world. It’s Philippians 4:8. It’s the conscious meditation of what’s true, noble, just, pure, lovely, anything virtuous or praiseworthy.

The key to reclaiming mental dominion and peace is meditation. There are so many challenges, so many projects and fear is trying to saturate all of it. My mind would cycle through everything until the sun came up.

I’ve found that in order to be effective at creating peace around us, we must 1st establish peace within us. We are only effective at making peace around us to the degree that we have taken dominion of our heart and mind and made peace within us. Jesus provided all that we need to regain this state that was lost in the garden. But like the fruit of the tree of life, we must choose to eat of it to reap its benefits. Otherwise it’s just another option that fail to choose.

In the intensity that was required to take this land, I’m reminded of God’s charge to Joshua in chapter 1 and verse 8 and 9 of the book named after him. Keep the word of God in your mouth and in your mind and do what it says.

Meditate

Speak

Do

That’s the sequence.

God had lead me through mediation and prophetically speaking, then came the doing but now, the cycle needs to reset for the next push.

So ground zero for the next push is meditation. In the chaos of the moment, I couldn’t find a Bible verse mainly because it wasn’t as clear then as it was now but I remembered Philippians 4:8 and I started to visualize walking up to the house in slow motion, everything is beautiful, what color is the house? How did we sure up the foundation? What kind A/C solution did we land on? Where did we buy windows? How did we get the electrical fixed….I needed something more simple than that.

So, I decided to picture McDowell Creek Falls, in Lebanon, OR. A place where I learned to find peace being with God and stacking rocks in the river. I just pictured the falls.

That’s lovely. That’s pure. This is simple. This will work. The next thing I know, I woke up rested, refreshed for the first time since moving onto the property.

We reset the sequence.

God prepared me for this moment in the months prior to this acquisition by teaching me meditation and declaration and then He walked me through the doing and the taking of the land which is uncharted territory for me.

Now it’s time to go back to the tried and true tools that got us here.

Meditation, faith-filled declaration and then, do what needs to be done.

“Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for The Lord Your God is with you wherever you go.”

A better world is waiting for us to choose it and we will always create around us a world that reflects the world within us.

Mental chaos and toxic thoughts that we allow will reproduce itself and we will create chaos and toxicity in the world around us.

Dominion on the inside unto peace reproduces itself in the garden where God has planted us.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I pray it’s blessed and inspired you to some degree.

If you’d like to sow into the journey, we could use the help for sure. Go on over to that giving tab.

Thank you. We love and appreciate you.

Matt Bond and The Bond Fam