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Snapshots of Serenity by Pam Farrel
just between us S P R I N G 2 0 2 0
Pam Farrel is a bestselling author of 45 books including coauthoring Discovering Hope in the Psalms: A Creative Bible Study Experience. She has been happily married for 40 years and enjoys traveling. Pam and her husband, Bill, live on a houseboat in Oxnard, Calif.
Visit my site! Love-Wise.com
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My mother is a shutterbug. She has shelves and shelves of photo albums. Her love for capturing the moments of life and love, friends, family, and fun has passed down to me. Photography captures priceless memories. In this world of social media, cultivating your image, and sharing only the outside joys (and avoiding the inner pains) leaves little room for learning to process the trials, traumas, and tempestuous storms. We live in a broken world. So many days seem difficult, discouraging, and downright depressing. Life is often a mix of tragedy and triumph. It is easy to click, post, and share images of victory, happiness, elation, or adventure. However, when we take the time to learn to process the pain, through the peace only Christ can give, with hope and help from His Word applied to our stress and sorrow, we can find inner tranquility and share ironclad strength and a proven path to serenity with others. Our spouse, our children, and extended family also gain a better, stronger, more resilient, and calmer version of us! In our own life, the past few years of our social media captured weddings, births of grandchildren, birthday parties, family vacations, travel to exciting places, and a new home on our live-aboard boat slipped in a marina on the Pacific Ocean. Sprinkled among these are raw moments of fears, frustrations, and stressors like the almost two-year process of downsizing, giving away nearly 90 percent of our worldly goods and belongings, then riding a roller coaster of emotions trying to sell our home for over a year, so we could move to take care of two 90-year-old in-laws.
During these years, God foreknew my life stress and knew I would need to cultivate joy in a new city with the new role of serving elderly parents. Through Scripture I was studying, God handed me snapshots of Christ and as I pondered Him, I gained more personal peace, serenity, and tranquility that transformed dark days into ones empowered and enlightened by God. Take your pains and pressures, and process them through these snapshots of Scripture. Bolster your faith by reviewing the goodness of God when sufferings shatter your tranquility: 1. Look to the cross: “…fixing our eyes on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:2). When you feel you cannot take another step, retrace Christ’s last days, and gain strength for your next steps. Like Jesus, look to the victory ahead, and by faith, write the results you are praying for.
2. Look at what you have, not what you don’t: “We are
hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8). This could read, “You are in a vice grip of pressure, but it won’t flatten you; you are at a loss to make sense of it all with doubts, but not in utter despair, because God will give an alternative exit or reroute you; God is always with you; you have been thrown to the ground, but not
killed.” It could be worse! List what is going right. 3. Look to help others: “Praise be to…the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). List ways God has comforted or encouraged you, then pass these forward to another. 4. Look for ways to smile: “A joyful heart is good medicine” (Prov. 17:22, ESV). Laughter releases happy endorphins. Do activities that have brought you joy in the past to regain hope for the future.
5. Look for purpose in the pain: “Then Jesus went…to a place
called Gethsemane, and he said to them… ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death… he fell with his face to the ground and prayed’” (Matt. 26:36-39). Take an extended time away with God to sort out your emotions and find answers to questions, or gain comfort. 6. Look to friends: Pray for each other. “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (Jas. 5:16). What four friends do you consider your stretcher-bearers (Mark 2:3-5)? Ask your friends to pray with and for you. It is my prayer that these snapshots of Scripture will lead you to God’s place of solace for your soul.
