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“When things change inside you, things change around you.”
How many of you take time to nurture your emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual well-being? Do you realize that nurturing ourselves is essential to living a happy, healthy, and abundant life? If you reflect on the times, you may have neglected yourself, give thought to what you were thinking and what you were feeling. It is so important to realize that there are consequences when you forget to pause. While we can become swamped, overwhelmed from exhaustion, or get distracted, failing to break causes us to:
- lose a sense of purpose
- lose a sense of focus
- lose clarity
- unintentionally hurt people
We have to prioritize the pause for those of us who desire to find peace in the middle of the pause.
We are in a particular time when peace is most needed. But what is it that we are seeking? Is it that inner peace of being mentally, emotionally, and spiritually at ease in the face of life stresses, anxieties, disturbances, and chaos? Or is it consciously keeping our mind at peace regardless of external circumstances over which we have no control? Let’s take a deeper dive into finding genuine peace that inspires.
A Deeper Dive into Finding Genuine Peace
Before the pandemic, how many of us ran from one meeting to the next or ate lunch on the run, if at all, due to conference calls and meetings, or lastly, found ourselves up late at night checking and sending emails? What is sad is that some mistakenly thought this level of busyness is how we grow and find peace.
Some of us have gotten caught up measuring our worth not only by the results we achieve but by how much of our time we spend doing stuff or the ugly culprit of measuring our success with others. One of the most frustrating things some of us have experienced is trying to have a conversation with someone distracted by incoming calls or sending messages via their Apple Watch! Too often, we take a similar attitude to the work we do and our engagement with other people and with ourselves.
Sadly, we live frantic lives, constantly on the go, at least in part because it makes us feel good about ourselves. To put it mildly, it makes absolutely no sense and by no means is it nourishment to our spirit. So how do we make room for a level of peace that inspires?
Making Room for Peace that Inspires
Do you want to experience God’s peace in your life – NOW? If you responded “yes,” then it’s time to do some mental decluttering. For those who don’t know me – I can hear my family laughing at what I’m about to say, but I am a neat, organizational freak better known as OCD! I have this insatiable need for things to be in order and sometimes find it hard to function if things are cluttered and out of place. To fulfill this need, I periodically engage in a process of decluttering. Decluttering allows me to experience a deeper sense of calm and helps me to flow in a more fantastic realm of peace.
Not only do I declutter physical spaces but mental spaces as well. To make room for a level of peace that inspires requires that our minds are free of all unwanted anxiety. For God’s perfect peace to take residence in our lives we must free our minds of clutter. The decluttering of spaces was an absolute Godsend in that it empowered me to get rid of even the residue of things that weighed me down and consumed my time and energy. Making intentional room for peace enables us to use time wisely to embrace the life God desires for us entirely.
Understanding the importance of nurturing ourselves and finding a greater level of peace encourages us to:
- Reorganize our priorities and re-evaluate our commitments.
- Let go of some things from our past to make room for the new.
- Take a leap of faith and commit to projects you have been putting off.
- Challenge any limiting beliefs that attempt to create barriers.
Action Steps to Make Room for Greater Peace
To find greater peace, we need to know when to engage as well as when to disengage. A purposeful pause is precisely what we need, especially when our brains are constantly being stretched. When we take moments to pause, we are empowered to see the path that can help us to reclaim a productive life.
Pausing allows us to bring our entire being into our work and in our lives. Finding greater peace helps us to spend our time on the things that matter most to us while dismantling the lie that taking time to pause will diminish our productivity.
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