Acceptance, most everybody agrees, is the answer to life's unwanted happenings. Too often we believe just be knowing that, that we have done it...that we've accepted this thing that seemed unacceptable just five minutes before. Does that seem likely?
The path to acceptance is made clearer once we realize that acceptance is essentially surrender. The difference between the two is that acceptance sounds prettier, sounds softer, more palatable...surrender, by its very nature, i.e., giving over, will never sound pretty, soft or palatable to the reasoning mind's standards.
One way to acceptance starts by standing before the bathroom mirror, and saying, out loud: "I have given up fighting anything and anybody. Thank you, Lord," and "I will fight no more forever. Thank you, Chief Joseph." We note that both quotes are all about fighting. That is what we are giving up...fighting. So surrender, looked at from a different angle, comes to mean "make peace."
Say I have a problem with Gertrude, with John. I need to set her/him straight, and everybody agrees I am right (because they have heard my side of the story...repeatedly).
I choose to fight her in my head or him in the home or them in the work place no more. I of myself cannot do that...I know from having tried enough time for the definition of insanity to ring in my mind every time I go there. I know God can, and I know that from my experience and from the experience of my friends.
I turn to God and make my surrender to It: "Take me and all my troubles and do anything you want with me." Then, when his name comes to mind or her actions start thinking for me...and they will...change my mind. I remind me that God owns me and all my troubles, and I think of lilies of the valley, Ruckus, the Life of Pi...all things of beauty that give me peace.
The hardest part of all is learning, yet again, that there are no one-shot deals. But the time will come (fairly quickly if we stay on the surrender side) when the thought of Gertrude or John or whomever will bring a grin, and we will see how seriously we had been taking ourselves in the first place.
We know peace, and we walk free in our own head.
Thank You.
No comments:
Post a Comment