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| Evelyne Ballestra |
Prince of Peace
Two years ago today, on my 60th birthday, my son, who was 24 at the time, and I shared a special event together. ...We each got matching tattoos.
Both of us. On our left forearms. Here’s why….. I grew up during the Vietnam war. My father was in the Air Force during the Korean War and most of the Vietnam war until he retired. Being a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a military father, I observed both sides of “make peace not war”.
But I didn’t really understand the true meaning of Peace and Jesus as the “Prince of Peace” until many years later. It was the fall of 1997 to be exact, when I went to Japan to shoot a documentary for the upcoming Olympics in Nagano.
We stopped in Honolulu for a couple of days on the way over. I decided to shoot a “Pearl Harbor” story while I was there and spent some time on the U.S.S. Arizona memorial. It was a gut-wrenching and extraordinarily moving experience. While I was there, a man slowly knelt before the marble wall of names of those lost that day in 1941. He bowed his head and said a prayer. He was Japanese.
A few days later, I was filming in Hiroshima, Japan at their peace memorial commemorating the victims of the WWII atomic bomb blast. In the museum was a collection of artifacts that survived the blast.
A bicycle. A child’s shoe. And a small, singed around the edges, wooden cross. A Christian cross. At that moment I finally got it... I understood.
Peace is in your heart and it is a great gift from the Prince of Peace. It was in the heart of the man who prayed. It was in the heart of the person who held that small cross. The world doesn’t give you peace. Jesus gives you peace.
“In the world , you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” -John 16:33/14:27
I shared my story with my son. Over and over again. That tattoo? A dove with an olive branch. I think of my son and God’s Son every time I see it.
Julie Weindel
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