Even though there is very little between the appearance of happiness and true joy they can be worlds apart, and it all comes down to the heart.
When a person strives for peace—seeking it for all their worth—but they cannot find it, often it is the case that they’re trying too hard. When a person is burning out, they crave peace more than ever, but they’re trapped within an unrelenting lifestyle. They may attempt to make all sorts of adjustments that seem reasonable and logical when a complete attitude change is required, because transformation and step change is required.
Ironically, everything we ought to know that needs to be held lightly is usually held too tight.
Joy is a gift that can only
be enjoyed without pressure.
It’s the same for peace.
Peace comes with letting go,
with accepting what we cannot change.
Hope is not hard if our expectations are realistic.
One of my favourite quotes is by a devoted Christian missionary who died in his 20s. Jim Eliot once said, “A person is no fool who gives up what they cannot keep to gain what they cannot lose.”
There is incredible wisdom in this pithy saying.
The key to be learned is that only as we let go and insist we don’t have control over that which we would love to control do we stand to be at peace. That’s right.
Give up on striving for peace
and suddenly peace is in sight.
It’s the same for joy and hope, and indeed as I’ve often said, peace, joy and hope coalesce.
Joy comes when we focus on the simplest things to the exclusion of the overwhelm we could otherwise get lost in. The overwhelm comes from chasing joy in a myriad of different things that would, of themselves, never deliver any joy. For hope, we subconsciously chase higher expectations on things than are possibly delivered. Our idealism betrays us.
Many things in this life promise joy, hope
and peace, but end up just being hoaxes.
Centrally what this is all about is the heart. What on earth am I talking about?
Women will often understand this quicker and better than men. Men tend to be pragmatic and fixers of things. Men might typically ‘organise’ themselves some peace, but may be very quickly undone when they find themselves in situations where they cannot control outcomes.
This is a concept that breeds hope,
joy and peace without any effort:
when there is nothing left to lose,
there are few expectations, hope, joy and
peace suddenly come sharply into view.
What is the key facilitator to this attitude that procures peace, hope and joy? It’s just that. It’s a heart attitude, and just about the only way to this place of being is, paradoxically, grief and suffering, i.e., when we experience unrelenting loss.
Grief lays siege to the idea
that we are in control over our lives.
Grief teaches us that our default thinking is wrong;
we are not in as much control as we think we are.
Grief withholds external peace, hope and joy.
Grief insists that we find peace,
hope and joy from within.
The greatest thing about adversity is that it teaches us to look deeper into the source of real peace, real hope, and real joy. Adversity causes us to search passionately for that which cannot be found any other way.
Grief is the antecedent of action. It forces us to find what we’re looking for in places we don’t know exist. Such pain undoes us, but in the unravelling we find ourselves. Grief causes us to go deeper in our understanding, deeper for answers, deeper for peace, hope and joy than we have ever been.
Being frequently broken by an experience that is void of peace, hope and joy we wonder why our lives have become so hard. And yet it’s not until we have been to such a place that we find the truest peace, hope and joy we have ever known.
We only get what we want in life when we
refuse to insist on having what we want.
And, dare I say it, this is the Gospel life.
The direct way to this life is God.
No comments:
Post a Comment