We often pray – “Make Me An Instrument Of Your Peace”. We want to be the conduit to give Christ’s peace to another. Yet, we don’t hold onto our own peace. Giving peace away is fine – as long as it isn’t yours!
I had one of those “Ah ha” moments last Sunday while watching the Mass on EWTN. I must admit that I don’t know who the priest was saying the Mass. Not a face I recognized. But his message was powerful and part of it went like this…if you had a gold bar and someone came up to you and insulted you or made you feel badly (=angry, hurt, embarrassed, humiliated etc, etc) you wouldn’t then hand them the gold bar and say –here–, take it. Why in the world would we hand over our gold especially to someone who just hurt us. Why then, do we so readily hand over our peace?
We all complain about the amount of stress we have while replaying a scenario in our minds of some incident where we were the victim. Guess what?! You are keeping yourself a victim by having the conversations again in your head, And again each time you tell someone else what happened and how you felt. How hard would it be to allow yourself to be an instrument of peace….to you?
You can’t give away what you don’t have. You can’t drink from an empty cup. Believe me, I don’t win any awards at this stuff. I declare to anyone listening that I can’t handle the situation and have handed it to God, telling Him (oh brother!) that He has to handle it for me. And then I systematically tell Him how badly He is handling it and what needs to happen. How many times do we give things to God to handle and snatch it back again before the words die out on our lips? Proverbs 3:5 -“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence do not rely.”
The hardest prayer to pray is to ask God for the best solution…..and then leave it there. Not what I want, not what I think should happen but what the best solution is. Let me be an instrument of Your peace. And let it begin with me. Maybe that line simply means that of all the channels of peace we try to set up, at least one of them needs to make a U-turn and come back to our own hearts. Isaiah 41:10 -“Do not fear: I am with you; do not be anxious: I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”
As Franciscans, we are called to minister to God’s people. Don’t forget that we are also one of them!
