Arrogance and Peace

I’m not often called arrogant.  In fact, I think it is one trait that I have never been accused of.  Neurotic, crazy, overly emotional, excitable, naive, sensitive – sure.  Arrogant — not a once.

But I think I’m going to break that trend and right here and now call myself arrogant.  Because I am.  But not in the way one might think.

See, I’ve been sitting here for weeks fretting about things.  Worrying about this, panicking about that, despairing over yet another thing.  I try to figure things out and prepare for all possible eventualities.  I try to figure out how to control outcomes and manage expectations.

And I’m always driving myself crazy, creating panic within myself, and turning my world upside down in a mess of mental chaos.  Do you know why?  Because I’m arrogant.

I guess somewhere in my head, I got the idea that I can control things and that I know what is best.  I know how things should turn out.  I know what the best outcome is.  If the world would just do what I think it should, then all will rest in splendor.  And on top of that, I have the arrogance to believe that I can control these outcomes if only I worry enough.

And you are probably reading this wondering how I believe worrying will affect outcomes, and I don’t have a clear answer for that.  But somewhere deep in the folds of my brain lives the idea that if I just don’t let anything go, if I just constantly obsess over it, if I research and ponder and question and wonder enough, things will go my way.

And I guess there’s a fear there too — that if I don’t worry about things and I let my guard down, bad things will happen.

But then it hit me today.  I don’t really have control over anything, and as hard as this may be for me to understand at times, I’m not omnipotent.  (Surely you are all surprised at this revelation as well.  Surely you all thought that all the answers to the universe reside within my mind.)

What if we just trusted God to be God and we accepted our role as mere humans?  Sure we need to do what we can to create the life and world we want to live in, but our hands are tied in many instances.  Certain things are just outside of us.

I would like to say that this revelation has been like a sedative to my psyche, but of course it hasn’t.  Ideas like these take time to set in.  But I’m going to keep working on it.

It’s just that I think we are all searching for peace.  We are all trying to find it, and for some of us (like myself) the more we try to find it, the farther away it gets.  And that’s because the actions we take to get us toward peace will never lead us there.  They are a wrong path, a facade, a deception.  It’s not until we stray from deception and head towards truth that we can ever actually find peace.

Because peace isn’t something to be found out there.  It’s not something that comes to us by magic or when all the events in our life line up in a certain way.  It’s there for us at any moment.  We just have to be willing to accept it, and we have to be willing to search for it in the places where it really exists.