Peace
Is Possible
“If
a sword had memory, it might be grateful to the forge fire, but never fond of
it.”
Robert
Jordan (Winter Heart)
My son
Jake posted this quote on Facebook yesterday, and it got me thinking about all
the painful situations we face and overcome. Simply living a normal human life is
like driving the Indianapolis 500 everyday—dodging cars going at speeds that
defy gravity and just praying that you won’t hit the wall. And yet, I’m sitting
on my porch this morning; it’s a beautiful, cool, early summer morning, sun
just above the trees, birds in full throat, squirrels chase up and down the tree
in front of me, and even a downy woodpecker hangs upside down on the stump of a
dead limb. To say it is peaceful would hardly cover the subject. Even so, it’s
peaceful only because I am at peace with myself.
Robert
Jordan said that the sword would be grateful to the forge fire but would never
be fond of it. When we gaze back down the years of our lives, we can trace and
flag all the things that happened, all the people who came and went, all the
devastating losses, all the broken hearts and dashed dreams—we know we would
never have chosen a single one of them. Yet, here we are, at peace with
ourselves in spite of that—I would venture to say, because of that. When we finally
learn to go with the flow, to meet and overcome all the hurdles that life expects
us to jump, we know two things: life has not singled us out to hurt, and we
have survived all of it. It brings a peaceful feeling. We are who we are
because we faced what we faced and, most of the time, we did the right thing.
This
quote by Roy T. Bennett sums it up: “When you do the right thing, you get
the peace and serenity associated with it. Do it again and again.” If we
face ordinary human challenges and deal with them by running away, or numbing
out, or fighting and fussing without end, peace will elude us. Ordinary human
challenges—like people leaving us, someone we love dying, loss of a job or even
loss of a child—feel overwhelming. But they are not. Everyone who’s ever lived
has faced them, and most of them survived. Some have even thrived, and some have used
their brokenness to build a whole new life for themselves and others. Peace is
possible.
Amy
Waldman said it this way: “Perhaps this [is] the secret to being at peace:
want nothing that is not given to you.” It’s a hard hurdle to jump, but it just
may be worth the effort.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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