Ever felt…The Peace of God?

“God help me!” she thought.

She couldn’t breathe.

“God help me.”

She gasped…

Took a gulp of air.

“God help me.”

It was all she could think.

“God help me.”

It was all she could whisper as her lungs clawed for air…

It had all started earlier that day…

“Are you going out for dinner tonight?” her mother asked on the phone.

She looked outside the window and watched the snow falling.

“No,” she said.  “We’ll just stay home where it’s warm and safe.”

But then the snow stopped…

The sun came out and melted away the white that covered the streets.

By the time her husband got home, going out for dinner sounded like a good idea.

They neared the exit from their subdivision where the road separated into two lanes…

Her husband steered into the exit lane.

Just as he did, a car entering the subdivision turned into the exit lane.

They collided head-on.

“God help me.”

She gasped for air…

Sure it was her last breath.

Her next thought was…

“I’ll be with Jesus.”

She felt a sense of peace…

The peace of God.

She knew that everything would be all right… no matter what.

At the hospital they told her husband she had three broken, dislocated ribs…

A shattered knee cap…

And a compressed vertebra.

They put her in a cast…

A “Turtle shell”…

Three weeks later she went home…

Where she spent the next three months in her cast and in her bed.

Her goal… to dance at her son’s wedding…

And she did.

That July her dad died.

A Christ follower, he knew where he was going…

And so did she… in a way that was far more real, far more personal than it had ever been.

She told me her story as we volunteered at a church conference.

She told me because an attendee had asked her how he could donate to the cause of the conference…

He told her his story…

Of how he had almost died because of blood clots…

Of how he was sure he was taking his last breaths…

Of how in that moment, he had felt a sense of peace…

The peace of God …

Of how that peace had stayed with him…

Changed the way he lived…

Allowed him to worry less about the future…

Allowed him to put God first…

Maybe that’s what Jesus meant about the peace of God when he said…

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.  John 14:27