Anticipated attendance: 50,000. Actual attendance: 460,000. Woodstock, August 1969. The major theme of this 4-day event was peace, and fittingly, even with the overwhelming numbers, even with epic traffic jams, even with scorching temperatures, high humidity, and torrential rain which turned the grounds into mud pits, there were no reports of violence. A line from a song composed during the festival pleads: ‘We’ve got to get back to the garden.’ Garden? As in the Garden of Eden? As in back to God’s plan? As in back to the Designer’s unsullied, intimate relationship with His people? As in a state of peace difficult to imagine today? It’s telling that ‘Edenic’ is currently used as an adjective and describes a place of great beauty, a state of bliss, happiness, contentment, or paradise. One might wonder about the origin of that word.
In my imagination, I look back to that wished-for, serene environment when nothing hindered God’s fellowship with his Creation. Evil had not yet entered the scene. There was uninterrupted, perfect peace there. Hmm. Not an existence easy to picture. It makes me wonder if that is what Isaiah had discovered when He said prophetically: “Perfect, absolute peace surrounds those whose imaginations are consumed with you; they confidently trust in you.” 26:3, TPT. Further, it makes me wonder if that is God’s desire for us today in 2025. It seems crazy to think about it, doesn’t it? Perfect peace surrounding everyone whose imagination is consumed with God? Could it be? If so, how does one totally flood their imagination with God? What would be required? Is that a goal to strive for or is that just being Pollyanna?
Maybe the obvious place to start is asking ourselves what things flood our imaginations. What are those things we are focused on, things which we find almost impossible to stop focusing on, things which keep us awake and worried, things we obsess over, things so strongly influential they can even cause us to set aside Scripture’s exhortations? I think the whole idea of peace is foreign to our fallen nature. It seems that in our ‘seeing through a glass dimly’ (1 Cor. 13:12) we, with difficulty, believe that a non-anxious state of mind is attainable. Ah, but what if? Looking forward to seeing y’all tomorrow, 10 AM, 3 PM UK, 4 PM ES. PD