Several places in the scriptures talk about having "peace... as a river." 1 Nephi 20 states, "O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments—then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea." Isaiah 48 says the same thing.
I have been around rivers all my life, and I have never seen a completely peaceful river (although St. John's Bayou and the Mississippi are fairly calm on good days), so the more I read these verses—all of the ones addressing having peace like a river—I can't help but wonder what could this possibly mean? Will my peace be rambunctious and unpredictable, or my life be tossed about like the waves of the sea? Could it mean that I will have ever-flowing peace, perhaps? The latter supposition sounds more reasonable, but maybe, just maybe, the former does apply.
A river can be dangerous when the levels are high or when the wind blows. Some rivers have hidden dangers, such as large river monsters, snakes, or piranhas. However, if you stand and watch a steadily flowing river like I have, you realize it holds many beautiful lessons. First, a flowing river is more pure than a stagnant one. Although most water sources, even rivers, have impurities or bacteria that humans should avoid drinking, a flowing source is better to drink from than from a pool. Peace like a river must then be clearer or easier to understand. When we feel that calm, warm feeling, we'll know that we are feeling true peace.
Second, a river constantly moves items along. I once wanted to see how fast the river was flowing, so I threw a stick into the river to calculate its travel over a certain distance. The stick never sank and never stopped. It kept moving along with the river until it left my sight. I'm confident that the peace we can receive from Jesus Christ will buoy us up and help us keep going even in the crazy journey of life, aiding us to avoid getting stuck along the way just as the river moved that stick onward.
There is something else that a river moves but is underneath its surface: rocks. As the river tumbles the rocks, the rocks become smoother. I don't know if having our peace like a river means that things will necessarily smooth out, but the promise I hold onto from the scriptures is that the peace we'll have will be greater than we now have, and that sounds like a good promise to me.
Unfortunately, our lives are ofttimes unclear. The answers we want don't always come or they come and then turn into something else we weren't expecting. We might feel prompted to step back after we've done all we thought we could do and have seen some good results, only to see that our stepping back didn't yield the final results we hoped for. But we have been promised peace, and even if that peace is sometimes bumpy or unpredictable, at least it's flowing.
