Searching For Peace In All The Wrong Places

Jesus taught, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid" (John 14:27 ESV).

You might not know Abraham Maslow, but his thinking has really hijacked the way that we pursue peace. In an article in 1943, he argued that we can't be self-actualized people until we have a good self-esteem. And we can't have a good self-esteem until we have love and belonging. And we can't experience love and belonging until we have our need for safety met. And we can't have our safety met until we have our bare minimum physiological needs met. One need met builds on the top of others until we have arrived at our goal in life. Generally, I would agree with this idea, but Jesus is the trump card. Instead of helping us traverse through Maslow's hierarchy of needs to finding the great life, Jesus just catapults us over the needs right into the midst of a great life.

Peace isn't found on the other end of our needs being met. It's about us being in the will of God. It's about having Jesus. The word translated peace can be understood as wholeness or completeness. Peace is found when one is made whole.

Think of it as our bodies. When you hurt a finger or a thumb, you realize how much it hurts to not be whole. If you lose a leg or an arm, you can still make do, but not being whole makes things much more difficult. Peace is wholeness. It's when we are completed. It's not when everything is perfect. It's not when all our needs are met. It's when we are whole.

In Liberia, I met this lady named Hawa. They call her Mother Hawa. During the Liberian Civil Wars, she found herself in a refugee camp in Nigeria for fourteen years. She didn't have her needs met. Her family was gone. She was alone. She was hungry. Safety wasn't even close to guaranteed. Yet she stepped out in faith and started an orphanage there in the middle of that refugee camp. She would meet needs. She would bring safety. She would love. She took in nearly one hundred kids and spent her life taking care of them.

One night during my recent trip to Liberia, I sat down with Mother Hawa outside the school in Johnsonville and we chatted for around an hour. Here I was, the rich American. Blessed beyond her greatest imaginings. Each of you, blessed beyond her greatest imaginings. And I was sitting by this sweet, precious fifty-year old lady who has spent most of her life taking care of orphans in a nation that produces a lot of orphans. She may not be as physically rich as us, but spiritually, she is a giant, who has every right to look down on me and all I have in a world where some have so little. Yet she doesn't. She is filled with love.

I heard her life's story. And what a life. She is freed from the refugee camp, but she still pursues her calling. She runs an orphanage now in Liberia. In the midst of despair and hopelessness, she found peace. Not through having some hierarchy of needs met. She found peace in the midst of not having her needs met. Instead of working her way up to the top of the hierarchy of needs, Jesus carried her straight to the top. He says that you may not have your needs met. You may go a day or days without food, but I am going to use you to give food to others. You may not feel safe at night, but I'm going to use you to bring safety to others. You may not have a family, but I'm going to use you to be the family to others. And in that, she finds peace. What a beautiful, sacred peace. I was blessed to be in the presence of it.


Jesus claims to give us peace. But have you ever notice that at times you feel like something is missing? That you are called to something that you currently aren't experiencing? That you haven't found peace even as a follower of Jesus? That's when you should look at Jesus' hierarchy of needs.

We want to be blessed, but we shouldn't pursue blessings. We should pursue being a blessing. We want to find peace, but we shouldn't pursue peace. We should live a life forgiving and loving others. We want to be loved, but we shouldn't pursue being loved. We should pursue loving others.

We must pursue Jesus. Pursue His will. Pursue His plan for our life. He will lead us to love, which will lead us to peace, which will lead us to blessings. That hole we have can only be filled by passionately pursuing loving Jesus and loving others more. Lasting Peace is not found outside of Jesus; it is found in Him. In Him we can be whole.

Find Your Johnsonville

To put down thoughts regarding our mission trip to Liberia resembles telling people of a great painting by only showing them one square inch of that painting. But words and stories are all I have to hopefully inspire and drum up more interest in what God is doing in Liberia. It is in this feeble attempt to express what God did that I hope His Spirit intermingles with our souls and brings vitality and passion where our souls too often slumber.

I'm going to deal with the biggest achievement of the trip. But in doing this, I realize that God often turns what we thought was an insignificant moment into the most significant event, while the things we thought were great and amazing become a passing footnote to our lives.

Don Winters (left) and John Bennett (right)

Last year, our small Hope 2 Liberia team of four people, traveled to the Heart of Grace school in Lower Johnsonville, outside of the capital city of Monrovia. What we saw there was amazing. This place was different. It was kept up. It was clean. We are part of Hope 2 Liberia, but this place, on the outskirts of Monrovia, was really a place of hope for Liberia. Something was happening here. It was a city on a hill. It was a beacon of hope in the darkness.

But there was also a great problem. A problem we wouldn't have known about except for a random, divine encounter in the airport that eventually led us to Heart of Grace. The school and the surrounding community lacked water. The school had been given a well by a Rotary Club out of Lafayette, Louisianna, but the well had dried up. A man in the neighborhood had spent days hand digging a new well, only to never hit water. The only water they could get was down a steep cliffside. A journey they would make every day, bucket after bucket, because water is life.  

So we saw the situation, but we did not have the pumps and equipment to do something incredible. I remember the feeling in that small group that something would be done. And one of our group members, Jon Bennett, said, "I'm going to come back here and fix this problem." So he went home, 5,000 miles away from Lower Johnsonville and the Heart of Grace school, but that community stayed on his heart. He worked out a plan. His passion to help Johnsonville and his commitment to work hard to meet the needs of those who did not have the ability to meet their own needs, combined with the engineering know-how of John Pierce, brought eventual change. As you are reading this, someone from the community in Lower Johnsonville is probably filling her bucket with safe, purified water. Water that was unsafe to drink at the bottom of the cliff, that traveled through lines laid, and was filtered prior to reaching a spigot at the top of the hill.

Eric Wowoh

Eric Wowoh, a Liberian, founder of the Heart of Grace school, the executive director of Change Agent Network, and a servant of God of the sort I have never before encountered had this to say:

"We now have plenty of water flowing through our school and community here in City View, Lower Johnsonville. Water has always been a major problem for us in this community, especially during the dry season or summer months. We have never had a public system for running water, which has meant everyone had to travel many miles for their water.  In our case, this has meant walking up and down a very challenging, rocky hill to get to a well. Heavily pregnant mothers journeying up and down to fetch water each day has been very normal since people have lived here."

"This is now history as God sent twenty-four members of the Hope 2 Liberia team to help bring an abundance of fresh, safe, clean drinking water to the thirsty in this 17,000 strong community of Lower Johnsonville, including all of the students and staff that use our school, the Heart of Grace."

"Thanks for your continual support and prayers! We are very grateful to all who have helped. This is a huge moment for us - real development and real change. Water is, indeed, life. May God water and refresh your life as you have helped to water the lives of others in such need."

All of this challenges me. And I hope it challenges you. All too often we see the world off kilter from what God has designed it to be, but we just turn a blind eye and unleash our apathy. We say it's a fallen world and things will be this way until Jesus returns. But those teachings weren't given to us so that we could be complacent. They are an acknowledgment that we will always have a mission to accomplish.

People from the Johnsonville community
waiting in line for water.

But do you see what happened here? Thousands of people now have clean drinking water because of the passion of one man. John Bennett - not a pastor, not a plumber, not an engineer - founder and owner of Cool Cayenne Authentic Printed Shirt Co. in Muncie, Indiana. He made a difference. He would be the first to say that he couldn't have done it by himself, but what is happening in Johnsonville right now, as we sit in the comfort of our own homes, wouldn't have been accomplished without his faithfulness to Jesus. When John stands before Jesus and Jesus says, "I was thirsty and you gave me a drink." John will humbly say, "When did I see you thirsty? When did I give you a drink?" And Jesus will say, "Johnsonville."

May we each find our Johnsonvilles. May we each strive to make a difference. Instead of pretending we don't have to do anything and that God's plan will magically get done, may we take seriously God's call to be His hands and feet. We have to get busy being faithful. We are surrounded by the hungry, the thirsty, the immigrant, the naked, the sick, and imprisoned. And in loving them, we love Jesus. Let's love Jesus. Let's love our fellow man.

Fleeing The Vanity

 "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2 ESV).

I found myself last night enjoying one of the best concerts in my life, The Avett Brothers at the Embassy in Fort Wayne. Passion. Love. Enjoyment. It was wonderful. They seemed to just lay it all out during that performance, unleashing their souls onto the crowd.

Then I had one of those moments. Maybe it was due to one of the introspective songs. I don't really know. Maybe it was because we were enjoying ourselves in a building where everyone that invested their lives in building it has passed from this life. But that sense of meaningless wanted to slither into my life and ruin my experience in the present. This is all vanity.

This is all meaningless. All of you here today - everyone in this crowd - will be gone tomorrow. In one hundred years, the joy that is felt here will have disappeared. Like it never happened. Or that is what the lie told me. That is what the voice trying to suck the joy out of my life said.

The word "vanity" is actually a "mist," "vapor," or a "mere breath." It is here for a moment and passes away. It is alluring in our moments of depression or sadness to fall prey to the wayward writings of the author of Ecclesiastes. They are very poetic, touching, and beautiful as words, yet they are destructive in action. These thoughts of vanity suck the joy out of our lives. When we read Ecclesiastes, we are reading the thoughts of a wounded soul who wasted his life. Either he, or someone else writing commentary on the book, got the point of life right and wrote it at the end of the book.

"The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil" (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 ESV).

Think of the whole process of learning the inspired truth from Ecclesiastes like getting the point from a movie, a really depressing movie with a great lifechanging point. A point that would be missed if you turned the movie off in the midst of all the pain and suffering. You see the misery that the wrong life brings. You see the pointlessness of all the wasted and misplaced effort. Or think of it as hearing a testimony. When I share my testimony, I share a lot of wrong thoughts I had. I share a lot of stupid actions. In elaborating on the life that comes from living life from a place of bad beliefs, we see the meaningless of it all. Ecclesiastes isn't in the Bible to teach us that life is meaningless. It's there to teach us that meaning can only be found in living for God.

Because life isn't meaningless. Even in the little things, amazingness can happen. An awesome concert, enjoying the blessings of God's good yet fallen earth with our fellow man isn't meaningless. A wonderful mix of music, vitality, God, my loved one, and my own thoughts stirred my soul. Changing me. Transforming me into someone better if I would only allow them to. Now, if we don't allow it to transform us, then the writer of Ecclesiastes is right: it is all meaningless. But life in God isn't meaningless.

To say the life that God has given us to bring about His will is meaningless is a slap to the meaning and purpose that God has given us. Loving our neighbors. Helping the hurting. Bringing hope to the hopeless. Sharing the eternal truths of God in a loving way. None of it is meaningless.

It's true. I won't be here in one hundred years. Everyone in that concert hall will be dead. None of us reading this article soon after its writing will be alive in that time. And this article will, more than likely, be lost amongst the mist of the massive amounts of writing that is being printed during our times. One more article to join the wasteland of history.

But this article, like all experiences, is not meaningless if it changes us. When we are faithful to God, He takes our relatively futile actions, shapes them together with everyone else's seemingly futile actions, and creates something beautiful. In Him, there is never meaninglessness. We must rise out of the mist into the new day.

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An even better song to exemplify this thought. It was released about a half a year after this article was written. I can't embed it since it's not on Youtube, so just click this link.