Seek the Peace of the City

On prosperity, peace, and the place I chose

For most of my life, two words have driven me: prosperity and success. I built a career around them. I measured my years by them. If you had asked me what I was chasing, I might not have said it out loud, but the honest answer was more…more reach, more rooms, more proof that the work mattered.

And then somewhere in my fifties…a young fifty, I might add, lol…the chase began to feel different. I still care about doing excellent work. But I find myself wanting something I’ve never really prioritized. I want peace. Not the absence of ambition. The presence of wholeness.

So I keep returning to a single verse, and to the way its words shift from one translation to the next.

"And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare." Jeremiah 29:7, NLT

Read it in the King James and the word is peace, three times over. Read it in the New International Version and the city is to be sought for its "peace and prosperity." The New Living Translation tells the exiles to work for that same peace and prosperity. The English Standard Version reaches for a quieter word…welfare. The Christian Standard Bible chooses to thrive: when the city thrives, you will thrive.

Notice what I noticed. Across all of them, the words circle the same three ideas I’ve recently been contemplating…peace, prosperity, and the thing we'd call success. And yet success, the word I would have reached for first, is the one the translators never really use.

That's because underneath every English version sits one Hebrew word: shalom. It doesn't mean what we mean by success. It isn't a finish line or a number. Shalom is wholeness…the deep, settled flourishing of a thing that is complete and at peace with itself. Prosperity, peace, success: in shalom, they aren't three separate pieces to the puzzle. They're one thing, and you can't pull them apart.

Which finally answers a question I've been asking: Is it possible to have all three?

The verse gives an answer I would never have written for myself. You don't get them by chasing them for yourself at all. Seek the peace of the city, God says, and in its peace you will find your own. The success I kept trying to secure for myself turns out to be bound up in the flourishing of the place I live. My shalom is downstream of Charlotte's shalom. I cannot prosper, not really, in a city I don’t bless.

That reframes the hustle entirely. For years I aimed prosperity inward…at my name, my work, my next thing. Jeremiah aims it outward…at the streets, the neighbors, the systems, the people down the road I'll never meet. Pray for the city. Work for the city. And watch your own peace arrive, almost as a byproduct, through a side door you didn't know was there.

Here’s where my story departs from the one in the text, though.

The people Jeremiah wrote to were exiles. They had been carried off to Babylon against their will, grieving a home they'd lost, told to settle in a city they never chose. That is not my story. I was not exiled to Charlotte. Charlotte is a place I’ve always wanted to land…a place I moved to on purpose, with excitement and anticipation.

And that, to me, makes my “instruction” even heavier. If God asked the exiles to build houses, plant gardens, and pray for the welfare of a city they had every reason to resent…how much more is asked of me, when I chose this place and love it? I’m not seeking Charlotte's peace reluctantly. I get to seek it gladly. The ambition I once aimed only at my own success now has somewhere bigger to go.

So here’s the shift…less hustle, more shalom. Less what can this city do for my prosperity, and more what would it look like for this whole city to thrive…with the strange and gracious promise that my own peace is hidden somewhere inside that question.

My goal for this week (and this website/movement overall):

Pray it. Name one neighborhood in Charlotte that isn't mine. Pray for its peace…its safety, its schools, its families, its future…the way I would pray for my own street.

Walk it. Ask the harder question of my own ambition: where is it aimed? Find one way this week to work for the city's flourishing and not only my own.

Lord, I've spent so long seeking my own success and prosperity. Remind me to seek the peace of this city, and to trust that my peace is somewhere inside its peace. Make me a blessing to this Queen City that I chose. Amen.