In my younger years I never realized what a blessing peace is. Maybe it was something I just took for granted, because I don’t recall getting to riled up about anything. That came later when I was married to an inept but prolific criminal, mother of four…no make that five…children, one of them an unruly adolescent locked inside an adult body. Can you guess which one that is? Anyway, I realized I tend to zig zag all over the place in my writing, just a glimpse of what goes on in my brain. The point is peace was replaced by a kind of stoic robot like state, which I thought I needed to maintain for my survival so that I could survive long enough to guide my children into a safe adulthood. No one suspected how frazzled I was and how close to becoming entirely unraveled. Thankfully I haven’t been in that place for a long time, but I have rarely experiened the peace that passes understanding either.
It is something I would love to have, and it’s a promise from the bible. “I will keep them in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on me,” but I find I have to be really intentional to approach that tranquil state of being, because it’s certainly not my default setting, and maybe it never really was. The years when I was raising my children were fraught with so much uncertainty, poverty, fear and tension. I think those years marked me and altered my DNA somehow, and I’m still in the process of recovery all these years later.I am the first one to say we are in control of so little and that we can’t rewind time, but do I behave that way? If I did, would the small blips on the radar screen of life unnerve me the way they often do?
Sometimes I have to really press in for peace instead of it being my place of residence.
The Daily Muse 