Sowing Peace

“For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.  But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.  Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”  James 3:16-18

What would happen if this were stenciled on every nursery room wall, not just in Pottery Barn blue but in colors of truth to live by?  Not just in stylish children’s room décor, but the fabric of lives lived out amongst one another from the time they began to lisp their first words and they begin to have the arch of the neck and the set of the jaw that screams, “Mine!”

What if we parents, if we go back a verse or two, walked “wise and understanding among” them?  What if we applied discipleship and discipline to these little lives in the “meekness of wisdom”?  What if our own lives did not have “self-seeking in your hearts” and our words and attitudes did not “lie about the truth” but lived out before their children the consistency of what we desired our children to walk in?  Would we notice a difference in the sweetness of our marriage?  Life around the dinner table?  In the morning light as a new day begins, with all the missing textbooks and remembered appointments?   In a clearer vision of what we were instilling in our children, by His grace alone and to the glory of God?

Do we believe that envy and self-seeking can infect the nursery of our children’s growing up years, like the flu they “catch”?  Do we also believe that they can begin to lisp the language of righteousness instead of the language of “confusion and every evil thing”?  After all, David tells us in Psalm 8 that from the mouth of babes and infants young, they the song of praise compose” (Psalter poetic rendering).  Just as we hold the spoon to their mouths to show them how to put in the pureed squash, we can hold the Word to their hearts and show them how to put in wisdom from above—pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield,  (even to the instruction of their mother); full of mercy and good fruits (even to that annoying sister who shoved their things rudely aside and broke that thing); without partiality (even to that girl at church who never is included); without hypocrisy (even when they are tempted to lord it over a sibling to whom they feel superior at the moment).  

Do we really think they are too young to sow the fruit of righteousness?  To live habits that make peace?  Perhaps I am too young; for it is yet becoming a language that I speak fluently.   That  language of Love. 

--on a gate in the kirkyard of a church where John Knox preached, Dalry, Scotland