“And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (1 Philippians 4:7). We sometimes make an assumption that the antidote to chaos and conflict and confusion is greater understanding. Well, that's largely true. However, we make a fatal error if we take the simple premise that a greater understanding leads to greater peace and draw it to its logical conclusion that a total and perfect understanding of absolutely everything would lead to some kind of permanent peace where all turmoil and strife has been completely eradicated. It is so tempting to want to understand everything so that we can then control everything and thus prevent any possible breach of the peace. But we aren't capable of understanding everything, much less controlling everything. As long as we cling to the fantasy that we can have all understanding and all control, we will never know peace. No matter how hard we have studied and prepared and thought of and planned for every possible contingency, there will always be a new fear or worry that sneaks past our defenses. We have to just pass by understanding everything and get to the peace of God that lies beyond. When we accept that we can't understand it all, we will discover that neither we nor the world at large exploded or fell apart because we didn't understand everything. Understanding all is an insubstantial mirage on our journey to peace. As much as we would rather not believe it to be true, we can have peace even if we don't understand everything. We can face the chaos and the conflicts, our fears and our follies, and do our best to muddle through it, blind and ignorant and befuddled as we are, and we can have the peace of God even when we have no clue what's going on or how He's going to pull us out of the fire this time. As long as we know that Christ is holding onto us tight and will keep us safe and whole, then we don't need to know all of the details to still have peace that it will all work out in the end.
