We have all been there, heck, I imagine many of us are there right now, rocking in an unsteady boat.. So often, we spend years… perhaps even, the majority of our days, caught in the chaotic unbalance of the world, trying to find ‘steady’… trying to find peace. Searching for Truth and balance, yet ignoring the One place we can find it. We fret and we worry and we search… seeking in the world, what it cannot offer us.
Yet, if we have been raised in the Faith… specifically, the Catholic Faith, we know that Jesus revealed the answer to us. And in theory, we know His Words to be true …”for with God, all things are possible”… But in reality, we are human and prone to arrogance and sin, and even with this teaching… this revealed ‘Truth’, we still struggle. We want our peace the way we want it. Wrapped with happiness. Sprinkled with calm…

We want our peace to come with all those feel good emotions that we tend to lack on our own. Listening to the lies of man… we cave in, and we ignore the Truth, and start believing  in the ‘happy’ promises of the world. We buy into it. Staking our life on it. After all, we are weak, and we are apt to want to satisfy the physical first, without even worrying about the spiritual realm. By shifting our focus away from Christ’s promise of peace, and the truth that we were in fact, created for the ever lasting, we fall and this is where the struggles really begin.

Now what do I mean by that? Well, so often we lose ourselves in the moments of the day. The constancy of pains and miseries that so often find their way into our waking hours… They begin to consume not only our intellect, but our heart… and whether we want to admit it or not, they begin to consume our soul as well. Unsettling it. Pulling us further away from the Truth. Then, when we are so wrapped up and focused on our physical and emotional wellness, we get sidelined. By a variety of foes… illness… sadness… loss… anxiety… even death… Soon we are back to treading on unsteady ground… grasping… gasping for life. In vain, we are trying to put everything back into order. Man’s order. It becomes an endless cycle of just trying to stay afloat.

With the waves crashing all around how are we to find balance? To find peace? This is where we must turn from the world and those promises of comfort, and rely solely on God. Rely completely on the Lord. He is our life vest… He is our Salvation. When we rely on ourselves, we put everything into the perspective ‘of man’ and we lose sight of the big picture. We lose sight of the reality of God and the fact that He is our only hope for peace.

I recently heard a young father describe his role in his young daughter’s life, and it pretty much sums up what God, Our Heavenly Father should be to each one of us. He said that his little two year old sometimes gets scared by a dog that is running along the fence barking or at a loud thundering noise, sometimes she even falls and gets hurt. Regardless of what causes her upset, and still being the trusting child that she is, without thinking… without analyzing it… she runs to him.  Trusting that he is her father, she allows him to hold her, to cradle her close to his calm body. He doesn’t really ‘do’ anything. He doesn’t have to chase the dog away, and he certainly can’t undo the loud noise. He really can’t even ‘fix’ her boo-booed knee. But what he can do, is offer her his loving peace. A place to retreat to when her world becomes unbalanced…unsettled. Even when she has suffered a hurt, and is in pain, his calm comfort… his peaceful presence, surrounds her and she is able to regain her sense of peace.
This is what God is like. He may not take away the barking dog, or the loud thundering noise. And most times we will still have the hurt of pain, but He is there, like the good Father that He is, surrounding us with His calm. Surrounding us with His secure embrace. He won’t make everything ‘peachy keen’ and it won’t be smooth sailing from here on out, but if we run to Him… allow Him to comfort us, He will give us the calm to rest our souls and make it through the chaos here on earth. It won’t be easy… there will be no gentle breezes and calming music… but if we trust in what Christ taught…”My own peace I give to you: a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you”… He will never abandon us  in the chaos. Never.  Not ever. But we, my friends, in our stubbornness,  may continue to abandon Him.