Finding peace

My stress has been through the roof lately.

It is impacting my sleep. My eating habits. My workouts. My work ethic. Everything has been impacted by my inability to reign in my stress and anxious thoughts.

To be fair, there has been a lot going on. We purchased a home. I am going through my final and hardest semester of grad school. I am doing more at church and in the community. My wife is pregnant with our third. We have been working through some things as a family.

Too many plates spinning. I tell myself it is only a season, and that is probably true. But nonetheless, it is a season I will eventually face again. Life is always stressful, the question is how can we remain at peace even when life gets complicated?

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I seek to answer this question by looking back at times in which I have felt great peace. I think of the times at my grandparents house. No real responsibility. The freedom to be creative, to think as I stared out into the blank canvas of empty fields. Feeling the comfort of a loving home surrounding me. Time seemed irrelevant. There was nowhere to go. There was enough things to do on their farm that I’d never be bored.

And yet the peace of those younger days could never last, nor should they have. It wasn’t and is not a reality to live in that manner forever.

Plus, I wonder, was I at peace then? I look back at those times now and fondly remember them as peaceful moments. But then I can’t help but feel that, at those times, I was full of angst at that time as well as today.

Peace, when experienced this way, is shown to be temporal. I don’t want a peace for a moment, but one that sticks to my bones and carries with me in every circumstance.

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You will know that you have obtained real peace when, even when things go wrong, you are at rest. That mistakes and bad happenings do not disturb the composition of your soul.

When things go wrong, I can’t always run to the location where I feel the most rest. When I face an issue, I will not always have my most trusted friend to turn to so that I might overcome the obstacle. Breathing exercises only can help so much.

There has to be some other way of being that allows me the peace I desire.

I believe the way of Jesus is the pathway to real, lasting peace. I believe that, in mimicking Christ’s character in our own existence, we will experience the Prince of Peace most clearly.

If every good gift comes from God, then if we are to want peace it would be best to first desire God. In discovering the character of God, we in turn are called to mimic the behaviors of God. It is in mimicking God that we will experience peace most fully. That is, we will experience peace most fully when we first pursue the presence of God.

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