Peace & Love

“Perfect love casts out all fear.” ~ Jesus (via His buddy John) I John 4:18

 

I think there’s a big difference between peace and just giving up. I’m not the least bit political, so I’m not speaking of homeland security, foreign policy, being a liberal or a conservative and certainly not about why there are so many seemingly senseless wars. I really don’t understand much about that sort of thing. Or maybe I do, in an abstract sort of way. But I’m a simple girl. I don’t like being caught up in these complexities of lurking agendas. Perhaps I’m totally uneducated and inexperienced in such adult matters.  So much seems to me to be glaringly obvious smokescreens with showing slips… like the naked emperor parading about while everyone cheers. While all the time, what the whole ridiculous game is trying to hide is the lust for money and power that drives the whole system into a very senseless place of prideful darkness.

I often wonder if there will ever be a solution to these endless struggles all over the earth. It seems they have always been and possibly always will be, until the end of time.

I may be childish, but I think I would rather remain a child.

All that aside, the peace of which I am speaking is personal peace. Letting go of what we think we can control. I think we all have a tendency to grasp and hold tightly to ourselves what we want and what we think we need. And so often we don’t realize these things, achievements and sometimes even certain relationships, are a house made of straw. At least this very thing has happened to me.

From my own experience it seems to me that a person, if honest with themselves, doesn’t have to live very long to come to some kind of realization that we have very little control over what will happen to us. In our own lives, our partner’s life, and certainly in the lives of our children. And I think that realization causes us to feel afraid. Very afraid. And that dark, dank cave of fear is an awful place to dwell ~ a kind of hell that separates us from the vulnerability of heart it takes to love. To risk. To trust what we cannot control.

Trying to control another person is not loving them. It will destroy them. Or it will destroy you.

Fear is the real enemy. Love and fear cannot exist in the same space at the same moment of time. Because love is based on trust. Trust willingly relinquishes attempts to control. When Trust grows up into Love… it gives birth to Peace. A person who is genuinely not afraid is a peaceful person. A person who is truly peaceful is not afraid to be vulnerable. A person who is willing to risk opening their heart, regardless of the unknowable cost, is a loving person.

Like Jesus.

Blinding Blanket of Reason

I truly believe all of Mankind
Is made for so much more
than mere logic can define.

As desperately we cling to
what we think we understand,
Our fear becomes a desert ~
a stinging storm of sand.
A blanket of distorted space and time.
A Blinding Blanket of the mind.

Our lives, our souls, our spirits
belong not to us
But to God Himself ~
The Transcendent Holy Divine.

He is All, and All is His alone
He is The Singer as well as The Song
He is The Question Hidden
and The Answer Shown

He is that all-too-familiar longing not one of us can hide.
That gnawing emptiness dwelling deeply inside.

He is waiting…
Patiently, lovingly, Everlastingly near
Our True Father ~
Long for Him no longer,
He is now and always here.

 ~tricia  woodworth 3/20/2018