Peace is just a month away...

I don’t know what comes into your mind when you hear the word peace. For me it is 4 days each July, when my wife and the children are down in far away Norfolk enjoying some holiday time with my wife'’s folks. I always take four days off to enjoy watching The Open Championship on tv. I am a bit of an Open golf ‘anorak.’ Isn’t that really sad? In my single days I would try to actually get to the event in person, attending all the practice days from 7am till 9pm, then all the championship days as well, before rushing home to watch the highlights on tv before starting all over again the next day.

Nowadays I content myself with the tv experience and actually you see a lot more although you forego some of the atmosphere and the thrill of actually being there. The preparation starts a couple of days before when the draw is announced. I print off the draw so I can keep all the scores of the players as they complete their rounds. I make sure all the provisions are in by Wednesday teatime. I won’t have time to cook properly for the next four days so great care is given to the selection of food items. If war breaks out in the next four days I am ready. Also necessary is a good golf magazine, but only one who has taken the time to print out a map of the course so I can assess and analyse the play. I am ready.

On the Wednesday evening the BBC have a preview programme to whet the appetite. Great! I could hardly be more excited if I were actually competing. Since there’s no chance of that, I make do with being the best spectator I can be. Thursday morning arrives and play generally gets underway at 7am or thereabouts. But the TV coverage doesn’t start till 9:30. What’s a boy to do? Well in the bad old days I had to content myself with flicking teletext every two minutes for updates, but in the last few years, the internet has rescued me. Every score recorded in real time, some holes on live webcam, combined with commentary from FiveLive just about keeps me sane till Peter Alliss and co. start broadcasting. Then four days of uninterrupted heaven. Sleep is an irritating interruption to the feast, but I just about manage to cram it in. About an hour into the coverage I am transported to a piece of green land somewhere else in the country and there I stay for four lovely, peaceful, at complete-ease-with-the-world days of self-indulgent isolation.

Of course the peace I’m experiencing is more accurately described as rest. A break from the norm. An unwinding. A recharging. Breathing.

But there must be more to peace than that. Real peace ought to be something that we can experience in the middle of life, not just at the peripheral times of holiday or special occasions. Peace for the Christian should be a distinctive of our character, a trait that people recognize in us because it is something that distinguishes us in our handling of situations, relationships and disappointments.

For some that word is just a dream, a notion we’ve heard others speak of, which sounds quite nice, but always seems just outside of our reach. Life in 2006 does not come with peace built in. It’s not part of the package.

But Shalom in the search to find peace. Mine is coming in a month...