It’s not really so surprising that neither the author of the guest post nor I had very shalom-y days yesterday. Shalom, sadly, is wrecked in our world ever since the Fall, but thankfully, that is not the end of the story.
In Bringing Heaven down to Earth, Nathan Bierma talks about how we become too accustomed to shalom being violated…
At its root, the word violence relates to “violate.” And violate means to cause something that shouldn’t be. This nuance is often lost when we hear the word over and over in news reports. To us, violence means the use of weapons and t resulting destruction of places and people. Its numbing regularity gives us the illusion that violence is one of the natural rhythms of the w world.
But it is not. It is the opposite – violence and sin are awful, agonizing, bloody, evil interruptions and perversions of the natural rhythms of the world. Sin, says Plantinga, is ‘the culpable disturbance of shalom,’ the interference with the way things are supposed to be. Sin makes a mess of what God made to be right and good. Sin can only be understood in terms of what it distorts and destroys: shalom.
What we need instead is a holy awareness—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance – of the fact that we are living in a world that is in many ways wrong, a world that is different from what was intended, what was established. The results of the sin that started when humans invited disorder into t he world – the pain and injustice that we see around us – are not just too bad, they are wrong. They shouldn’t be.” (Nathan Bierma, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth, 54)
For reflection:
What violated shalom have you come to expect as “normal,” or “to be expected”?
What do you do about this kind of wrecked shalom? (Shrug your shoulders, rant, bury your head, weep, pray, work toward restoration?)
What do you do with a day filled with things that are “not the way they’re supposed to be”?
