Peace Comes to Us as We Accept All That We Are, Just as God Made Us

The human soul is created by God; it is one creature among all the created things that come from God. Like everything else in the world, we are created precisely for where we are, placed to live in the same music as do the forests and hills, the otters and bears, the critters of all kinds and the birds of the air. Flowers and mountains are no strangers to us, we are all part of the same chorus. All of it is from life, and all of it glorifies the end – and the beginning – of life, who is Jesus Christ, our Creator and the fulfilment of who humanity was always intended by God to be – God Himself, dwelling among us!

Thus we should never be concerned with trying to sieze anything more than what God has already given. Everything we think is important to us; passes into obscurity. Most of what we are seeking to achieve will never come to fruition. The more we try to take control, the less happiness we will find in what we are doing. We may even achieve what we desire to do, and rise up above that very distant goal, yet at that pinnacle of our greatest achivement, still find ourselves empty and wanting something more. This hole, if it is not filled by God, only grows wider and wider as we keep on falling on the same bad habits, which distract us away from the present, and turn us towards ourselves, on our desire, on what we think is important to no other variable but me. But that is not the way God intended us to be.

We are all of us living precisely where God has appointed us, and the first step to be back with God, is to be thankful; because today is a gift. We did nothing to deserve it, we did nothing to earn it. None of the work of our past has brought us here, nor will anything we do now secure us for the future. Everything is in the hands of God, and as we serve God, so will God reward us according to his will at work in us.

A day of good work is all the Lord’s, what harvest it produces, is still the Lord’s; and even if we eat of it and think this is where we should always be, sitting here on all that we achieved; it is never our own, but always God’s. We are called to remove ourselves from what we think we possess, to resign everything to God, and to see there the truth that we missed only in ignorance: everything was already the Lord’s!

Nothing we earned for ourselves, really belonged to us in the first place: the harvest we gathered, was only tended to by us, and it was successful only because we followed an ordered schedule to grow a steady crop, obeying the Lord in keeping in step to his good spirit. It was the Lord who gave us a day to plant, the Lord who gave us the tools, and God who causes all the growth; and thus when we finish gathering our harvest, and have the goal we long set to accomplish, to say it was all our doing is foolishness. We were cooperating with the Lord, and only through obeying him have we met with this gift. If we ever say to ourselves, I have earned this for myself, by myself, the light of the Lord we leave us, and we will soon end up wallowing in a puddle, forgetting how we ever even used a shovel. This because we thought it would be better to rest on this particular afternoon, because we had already worked for thirty minutes, and our knee is aching fiercely, and the day is too hot anyways to go about working. This we blame on the circumstances, and do not consider, that if we had kept the Lord in view, and served him instead of ourselves, we would have strength to fly through the day with all the joy we have always known, finding God in the littlest things that we are doing – whether it is in the cool breeze, or the clouds passing over us, or anything else on the field that brings our hearts away from this world, and into a contemplation on God.

This ocean bursts through the dam of our hearts, as we resign ourselves to God; not going forth first, but letting him lead us wherever he chooses. It is obvious where he is moving, and where he is calling, and what we are called to be doing; if we stop seeking our own way over the Lord’s way, and instead focus on love, the present, the hour which the Lord has given. Whatever inhibited us before will pass away, a simple act of praise will lead us back into the Lord, where we will be on the mountaintop, freed from the burdens which once hindered us. Before we cared about every detail that seemed to matter, on all the worries of the home and the needs of the day; but when we finally let go, and accept all that the Lord has given, then we enter into God, living by faith, and find his peace that surpasses understanding, a joy which promises us that this life is not our home, but that God is faithful, and Heaven is ahead of us, as long as we hold Heaven in our hearts.