If our desire is to receive God’s peace, we must ask ourselves this question: What are the essential conditions for being at peace?
It seems to me that there are two essential elements that complement each other, elements that can’t be separated from each other.
The first is trust, an absolute trust in the mercy of God and in his fidelity. This trust isn’t always easy to practice, of course. We don’t always have sensory proof of God’s love, and life sometimes brings us the heavy burden of suffering and disillusion. But this trust is necessary. And even if God leads us on paths that aren’t always those we would want, he never betrays our trust. “Hope does not disappoint us,” St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans (5:5).
The principal enemy of our peace is not exterior circumstances or attitudes of others, it’s our lack of faith and trust in God, which makes us lose our certainty that he can draw good out of anything, and that he will never abandon us.
If we truly had faith, every difficult thing that happened to us wouldn’t be able to trouble our peace. The mountains of worry that sometimes come would be quickly thrown into the sea.
The second essential condition for peace of heart is saying “yes” to God without hesitation, which means completely opening our hearts to him and being determined to refuse nothing to God. Put simply, we must let God have full permission to enter into our life and lead it as he desires.
To desire the will of God in all things isn’t always easy. We are often attacked by fear, precisely because we lack this faith and trust. We don’t believe enough that God wants our happiness.
Sometimes we have a terrible fear of giving ourselves completely to God because we don’t know where that will lead us, and we would prefer to remain masters of our destiny, to be sure that everything goes according to our desires. But this is a bad calculation. We don’t really know what is good for ourselves. Only God knows. It’s better to trust him and leave ourselves in his hands.
Notice also one thing: Everything in our life that was not given to God will sooner or later become a source of worry. We are then left to manage it by ourselves, with our own resources, our own light, and in the end, it risks creating a lot of anxiety for us.
On the other hand, if we have given everything to God, we are freed from this burden of having to resolve everything by ourselves. It’s the Lord who will take care of it, and he’ll do it better than we can. Let us remind ourselves of the beautiful words of Jesus in the Gospel of St. Matthew:
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11:28-30).
Life is lighter and simpler when we have given everything to God. When we seek only God, we are always at peace. By contrast, those who look to themselves, who want to manage and control their existence on their own, are loaded down with heavy cares. One of the great enemies of interior peace is the attachment to our own ideas and to our own will. On the contrary, detachment is the source of peace.
Of course, it is fine to desire and want things, but we must always retain a certain detachment from our desires and from the results of our efforts, without worrying whether things will go as we wish.
This detachment is itself founded on trust. God knows better than we do what will make us grow, and he wants our true happiness even more than we do. And this trust is liberating. The greater the trust, the more we will be free, and the more we will find peace.
From Jacques Philippe, Nine Days to Welcome Peace, pp. 44-47
Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash
