Kayla was shaking the box of bricks, surprised and delighted by the loud noise it made. She shook it more and more. Louder and louder and then the lid popped off and bricks cascaded everywhere. She chuckled as she realised that she had opened the box and freed the rainbow coloured bricks now scattered all over the wooden floor. She began to kick them around when she saw gold. A dodi.
She picked it up and put it in her mouth and continued in her quest to make noise with the bricks. A few minutes later she picked them all up, put them back in the box, got the lid back on and started the ritual once more, but she did not return the dodi, that was in her mouth and for her, would remain there forever. Forever pacified.
Grown ups, generally, do not suck on soothers, dummies, dodis or binkies. Some of us use chemicals either legal or illegal to pacify, some of us use food, some of us use music.
Why do we have this yearning from the youngest to the oldest to be pacified?
What is it in our lives that we need to alleviate?
We are out of kilter. The rhythm of our lives is out of tune with the tune we were supposed to be following. Our heartbeats are fighting against the rhythm instead of tuning in.
Words that can be exchanged for pacifier are mediator and peacemaker. Now a picture forms – no longer a piece of plastic less than two inches wide. But a cross.
And not just any cross, but The Cross. The cross that Jesus hung on, the cross on which Jesus died. The great mediator. The great peacemaker.
When our rhythm of life is in tune with the Lord’s we no longer need alcohol or nicotine or to snort something up our nose. We no longer need to know the biscuit tin is full and the chocolate press overflowing, we no longer need to listen to Bach or Korsakov, we no longer need to watch endless drivel on television and cram our heads with useless celebrity gossip.
Jesus died so we might be saved, but we have to choose to do life with God. We have to choose to explore salvation, we have to choose to lose the binkies of the world. When we do life with Jesus we don’t need pacifying because we are living, true living, really living. We don’t need patting on the knee and vapid words of “oh it will be okay.” We don’t need to hold down in the fog of “worldly” peace.
When we choose to do life with God, our hearts beat to a different tune, God’s tune. The rhythm of our life becomes more and more like Jesus’. The fruit of the Spirit is in evidence in our lives and the more these become seen and known, the stronger the rhythm beats.
If our life before Christ can be seen as a box of bricks, life, after can be seen as uncontained joy as the box bursts open and the fruit of the Spirit, flows out everywhere. Jesus is not a dodi, we no longer need a dodi.
Knowing Jesus is not an opiate, Karl Marx was wrong. Knowing Jesus is so much better than drugs, so much better than chocolate, so much better than anything this world has to offer.
Kayla had to give up the binky, her parents proscribed the use. And she will be better growing up without this pacifying, her teeth will thank her parents in later life and her life rhythm will, we pray, move closer and closer to the Lord and his rhythm.
Rebuilding Community 
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