Simplicity is the path to the deepest treasures.
Religious technique is brushed to the margins when essential virtues are in play. Take peace, for example. Though we blunder about in search of it at many levels, Paul directs words of iconic simplicity to that peace which places the individual human heart at rest:
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
The instruction is almost proverbial in its spare dualism. One either worries or one worries about nothing.
One either worries or one lays one’s requests before the Lord’s eyes.
On either worries or avails himself of a peace from God that passes all human understanding.
One either worries or has one’s camp sentried by God’s own peace.
It all seems so simple. That, perhaps, is this word’s very power.
Paul the activist reveals the other, formidable side of his notional awareness. One can do very little. God does it all. This complementary rather than contradictory quietism in the face of the largest human dilemmas marks out the borders of the apostle’s resolutely theocentric assumptions. When one has done what one can do, one has done very little. Yet God has barely begun to act.
The chaos that envelops our minds amid life’s little dramas is the same that torments others like us who pay the same bills, repeat the same arguments, suffer the same agonies. With a little more distance, we might concede some of the angst-ridden passion of our own variants.
Yet we do not, for fear, risk, threat, worry seem terribly real and unavoidable right here, right now, smack in this little orbit of mine.
Paul’s dualism cuts through this matrix of self-absorption in a way that sets one’s mind to similes involving butter and a knife.
Don’t worry about anything. Talk to God. Peace takes up its post, well-armed and capable.
Canter Bridge 
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