Finding peace

Feel like you are juggling all the things? 

In my quiet time of reflection (which admittedly these moments come to few and far between these days), I was praying about peace. Just the word peace makes me exhale. Say it aloud. I bet it does for you, too.

We all want a sense of peace. No matter what zip code we live in, what country, whether we are White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian or any other beautiful culture, we all crave peace. But what I learned tonight and heard loud and clear in my quiet time as I laid next to my 3-year-old praying over her quietly while she drifted off to sleep are two additional “p” words: pace and purpose.

I could no sooner finish whispering the word peace in my prayer that the words pace and purpose pummeled at me. And in that moment, it became clear to me that in order to have peace, you have to watch your pace, and your pace gets out of whack when you lose focus of your purpose.

When my pace gets out of whack from trying to do ALLLL the things that aren’t necessarily aligned with my purpose, I lose my peace.

Peace comes from alignment with pace and purpose.

Self-care can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me, I think that self-care means constantly working on the alignment across these three “p’s”: pace, purpose, peace.
It is a daily journey, and if I am honest, sometimes a daily struggle. But consistently working on this alignment is the only way that we can “show up” as ourselves every day, with both our unique talents and our flaws – and we all have both - but our flaws get amplified when we are out of alignment with our purpose and off pace, which steals our peace.

At the end of the day, peace comes from our ability to rest our heads knowing that even if everything isn’t checked off the to do list or the problem isn’t fully solved, we did good work for the day.
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Tomorrow affords us a fresh opportunity to live out our purpose once more, check our pace, and find peace in the process.