God grant me the
SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change;
COURAGE to change the things I can; and
WISDOM to know the difference.
I think that the Serenity Prayer is one of the most important prayers ever written. It is so simple and spot on. Simple does not mean easy, but if we can master and live the serenity prayer, then it naturally follows that we have peace.
Acceptance is one of life’s most difficult lessons – especially as Americans. We are taught to be doers, achievers, hopers and believers. Acceptance has a ring of “giving up” to it, and that just goes against our DNA. But acceptance is not really giving up. It is surrendering the people and the circumstances over which we have no control, and offering them up to Bigger Hands. It’s dropping the “heavy as a boulder” bag at Bigger Feet and trusting that Bigger knows what is best. It’s asking Bigger/God/the All Knowing Universe/the All Loving/ the All Wise to give us peace among the people and the circumstances that frustrate us the most, yet we cannot change. Instead of asking for others to change, we ask for acceptance and peace, and a different perspective, amid all that we cannot change. We ask for focus on what we do have the ability to change – ourselves and the way we look at our lives.
I have so many examples in my own life when I tried to force my will, my wants, my ideas of what was best, on to people and situations that weren’t going to budge. I exhausted myself trying. Finally, in my most tired, spent moments of frustration, I knew that I had no other choice but to surrender my issues to my Higher Power. I was depleted. More often than not, when I stopped trying to fix my broken toys and I handed them to the Expert, that is when things really started turning around in my situation and I could breathe again. Often, situations got “fixed” in ways I could never have imagined, but looking back, the solutions were often miraculous and awe-striking, and nothing my limited mind would have conjured up. If I believe God to be an All Loving presence, the Creator of all that is, why wouldn’t I trust the judgment of God? God/Creation gave us free will, and in many ways, we have run a muck with our free will and really created some horrific disasters. But if we finally give those disasters over, God will turn them to Good. It’s what God does. Pain, in that sense, is a gift to us. When we finally reach our limits to Pain, is when we finally come to our senses, to hand that Pain over to be worked on by Bigger Hands. The Bigger Hands will lead us to what we need to do, to assist with our problems. Sometimes that can be as simple as looking at the problem through Bigger Eyes and seeing it in a different light.
“When you find no solution to a problem, it is probably not a problem to be solved, but rather a truth to be accepted.” – curiano.com
“Sometimes you don’t get what you want because you deserve better.” – u.fo Twitter