Shalom

Over the past year we’ve hosted three Healing Services.  These services brought our community together to strive for a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and to pray for the healing of memories, family-life, and grief.

There are so many areas of our lives where we need healing.  We are surrounded by an aggressive culture and live in a violent world.  Daily we are bombarded with images of brutality in our cities and in countries around the globe.  As we see these images we become accustomed to the violence they portray and can begin to accept it as normal.

The reality is that on any given day the media presents us with more violence than our grandparents might have witnessed in their entire lives.  While we see the result of this cruelty in the news, much of it is “make believe” in television shows; but as any psychologist can tell you, the mind knows no difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined. 

Daily, we see images of mass murders in Africa; reflections of violent crime portrayed on television and first-person shooter video games; websites devoted to glorifying the actions of murderers and psychopaths; and more.  Our society, and especially our children, come to understand that we handle our problems through violent acts instead of dialogue and conversation. 

Jesus told His disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” He goes on to tell them that He doesn’t give peace as the world gives it.  We understand peace to be the absence of conflict.  But the peace that Jesus refers to is the Jewish concept of “Shalom” (Shă - lōm).  Most of us understand Shalom means “peace,” but that’s only a small part of the meaning.  Shalom means completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, and harmony.  In short, Shalom means perfect and full peace living in right relationship with each other and with God.  This is the kind of peace Jesus gives: this is the kind of peace that we’re missing in our world today.

We will gather on Sunday, April 19^th at 5:30 PM to explore the inner peace and global peace that Shalom calls us to.  Through music, prayer and reflections we will look to rid ourselves of those things that serve to distract and prevent us from true peace.