BEING PEACED IN THE MIDST OF FEAR

H]ave patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. -- The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

I first posted this Rilke quote on March 29, 2016. 

It is particularly fitting for me today what with my current resistance to my personal fear of dementia...my fear that I may be coming into full-blown dementia. (Personally, I prefer to refer to it as old-age forgetfulness.) 

Words are comforting, we rely on them to sooth our jangled nerves. Ah, but they come into reality when we try to use them to fix our perceived broken place. Soothing is nice, but it doesn't fix. 

Comes the blinding light: Only God can fix, and only God's will, God's way can do that. 

Comes the dire reality, seldom if ever does God's fix arrive looking personally comforting. The lesson we continue to learn: We must needs walk through our pain...or, more aptly, the cause of our pain.

Forever lesson, relearned as needed, sometimes daily: If it is appearing to us, welcome it. The cause of our pain is our resistance to what and how we are perceiving our life's problem.

Again, and yet again: Hug it and kiss it and let it go.

There. There is the proof that words are comforting, but they do not fix. Living through our trauma, be it a broken fingernail or the death of a loved one, is the way of the Lord. 

How else can we build faith if we never have a reason to have faith?

I feel fear...I pray my thank You for the fear for it is truly turning me to God.

Thank you.