When I was in high school, I used to sign all my papers with my name and a peace symbol. My geometry teacher, Mr. Gustafson, always joked that I was born in the wrong decade—that I would have made a great hippie. He predicted that I would grow up soon, cut my hair, and stop using that ridiculous symbol.

Well, I did grow up. And I did cut my hair, although I waited until I was 25. But I still use that peace symbol here and there—partially to prove Mr. Gustafson wrong, and partially because my view of peace was and is bigger than he gave me credit for. It’s not just some pie-in-the-sky, liberal fantasy about everybody melting down their guns and turning them into farming equipment (although there is scriptural basis for that very idea). Instead, it’s rooted in my experience of Jesus.

As a teenager, I felt that the Cold War was due to an inexcusable lack of trust. Yes, I was naïve about politics and foreign policy, but I wasn’t all wrong. In a hit song from 1986, Sting sang: “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” Both the U.S. and Soviet societies were taught to see the other side as inhuman, to everybody’s detriment.

During the Reagan years—when my generation, too, was justifiably terrified of nuclear obliteration—I realized that peace is not merely the absence of open warfare. It’s the presence of something much bigger than that. Jesus taught us that there’s no such thing as “peace through strength,” at least not through human strength. Peace is a gift from God, and it rests on the assurance that, ultimately, God is in control.

Jesus brought peace in the form of wholeness and freedom. He cured the sick, restoring them to the communities from which fear had excluded them. He taught the rich to set themselves free from the money they were so afraid of losing. He reminded them that someday, all secrets will be revealed: the telling of good secrets will produce joy, and the telling of shameful secrets will invite us to grow. Jesus even taught us to let go of our own lives—to cling to nothing but God. At every turn, he reminded us that we have nothing to fear—not even death. He demonstrated this last point most visibly.

When we are at peace, we can take more interest in helping others than in helping ourselves. We can admit that we don’t know everything. We can watch Christ working in people who are very different from us. Peace takes destructive conflict and makes it constructive, for the benefit of everybody concerned. It helps us sacrifice the things we don’t need, so that others can have what they need merely to survive.

I’ll leave it to the foreign policy experts to determine how this might play out internationally as we all pray for world peace. In the meantime, I’ll do my part. When I see you in church, I’ll greet you with a hug and say, “God’s Peace be with you.” And I’ll mean it.