May 18 Krum Star Article,
"Peace Amng the 'Unsolvables'"
It was a late night phone call.
It had been a long day already. I had no energy for anyone
else—I just wanted to rest and prepare for the rigors
of the following day. I tried to ignore the phone, but
the caller persisted. When I answered, my sister's voice
came through, "Daddy is ill and insists he needs
to go to the hospital."
My sister was also exhausted—earlier
that day had been the memorial service for her mother-in-law,
whom my sister had cared for in the weeks preceding her
death. But my sister lives 10 miles away from my parents,
and I'm over 50 miles away, so she and her husband headed
over there. I kept my mother and father on the phone to
help the time pass while waiting for my sister to arrive.
I have been quite concerned
about my parents for some time, but my solutions to their
problems are not their solutions, and never have been.
While I have much respect for them, I also know that we
live our lives very differently. When I try to impose
my solutions upon them, I encounter huge resistance. No
surprise—I'm equally as resistant when they try
to impose their solutions to my life challenges upon me.
I have finally realized that I can't solve their problems
for them. With that realization, I have started calling
these concerns I have for them the "unsolvables"
of my life. There are lots of "unsolvables"
around—besides the personal ones that all of us
have, we've also got the global ones like terrorist attacks
and suicide bombers and famines and earthquakes and floods
and tornadoes, not to mention rising gas prices and global
warming.
No matter how I try, I can't
fix these problems. No matter how little they are to my
liking, I can't wish them into non-existence. These things
just are. So do we let them take over our lives, destroying
hope of the kind of peace that Jesus promised his followers?
If not, what do we do with these kinds of problems where
we can offer no effective solutions or immediate fixes?
In other words, is it possible
to find a deep inner peace in the midst of these unsolvable
situations? Yes, I believe it is. That kind of peace comes
by exercising the discipline of choosing to accept those
"unsolvables" with a receptive heart, knowing
we will learn and grow from our exposure to them. We must
add to this receptiveness the courage to actively change
the things that are in our control—such as our own
responses to them. The combination of such receptivity
and courage leads to an abiding peace. That kind of peace
is contagious—just as panic can be contagious. The
kind of peace that Jesus speaks of is not some state of
eternal bliss—or state of everything suddenly being
OK or arranged to our liking. It is the peace that knows
that God is present, even in the most challenging of circumstances.
When God is present, the Kingdom of God is all around
us, and can be experienced.
So on the phone that night,
I listened patiently to my father and to my mother. While
I disagreed with some of their decisions, those decisions
are not mine to make or to change. What I could do was
offer love, a listening ear, experienced counsel to my
sister as she waded through the medical maze, and supportive
prayers for all. And peace filled my soul. That's a great
gift.
