...my kind of river

Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace,

Over all victorious in it’s bright increase;

Perfect, yet it floweth fuller everyday,

Perfect, yet it groweth deeper all the way.

---Frances R. Havergal, 1874

I have never floated on the Mississippi River, but I’ve read Huckleberry Finn. There is a vivid description of the river that stays with me. Huck and Jim are floating on their raft down the river, intending to veer into the Ohio where it joins the Mississippi. Neither had ever seen the Ohio, or that part of the Mississippi; when they realized that the time for paddling hard upstream of the Ohio was nigh, it was obvious that the river was too wide, too deep, too inexorable to fight against.

I thought of this passage when I read the hymn text for today. This river of God’s peace? It’s no shallow, meandering, drought-sickened rivulet. This river, this peace, is a powerful force, growing ever deeper and fuller in its completeness. This peace is not a resigned, mousy resignation to the ‘true’  powers in the world. It is the force that is able to sustain life, overpowering the unrest, the injustice, the terror in the world with its current. This peace is the true force to be reckoned with.

That’s my kind of river.