How The Sweetness of Peace Melted My Heartache Away
The sweetness of peace has truly melted my heartache away. With everything I’ve gone through, I know for certain I wouldn’t be here today without the peace of God. The word of God has given me a peace and a strength to keep pressing even when it hurts.
The bible says in Joshua 1:8 to meditate on the word day and night so that your way may be prosperous, and I’ve never heard of something truer in my entire life. Today I want to articulate to you the ways this bible verse has given me hope and peace. I want to teach you how to taste the sweetness of peace and how it can melt away your heartache too.
Let me ask you,
Have you ever had a really rough day? Has a particular person or situation ever got on your nerves so much so that you can’t stop thinking about it? I’m talking about it keeps popping up in your head over and over again.
Thinking about something over and over again is called ruminating. Ruminating means to repeatedly rehearse something over in your mind. If you can easily ruminate over situations that get on your nerves, how easy would it be to switch out that annoying situation for a bible verse that waters your dry soul?
Meditating as mentioned in Joshua 1:8 means to repeatedly think on something so deeply that it seeps into your brain. Kind of like a sponge. If you put a dry sponge over a puddle of water, it’s going to absorb. The same thing happens when you put a mind dry of the word of God, over living water and let it sit there. It’s going to soak it up. And that’s exactly what you need in a time of heartache.
You don’t actually realize it but your soul is starving for the truth. Your soul doesn’t just need one sip of living water. It needs an endless fountain to be well again.
Your Personality
Thinking about a hurtful situation can make you mad all over again as if it just happened. Letting this memory cycle through the river of thoughts in your mind everyday will inevitably effect how you feel. Why? Because emotions are always attached to thoughts.
If you’ve been alive long enough to feel and experience emotions, then you know how you feel can very well affect what you do. So here we have a thought that comes in the form of a memory. And as you ponder on this memory it produces a certain emotion in side of your soul. As you continue to think out this thought, over and over again, your feelings and your actions start to change.
Your feelings and actions are what make up your personality as a human being. Your personality is who people know you as, and how you interact with the world around you. Your personality could normally be super happy and positive but if you keep thinking about something that annoys you, you could start getting really snappy, and agitated and become not so nice of a person.
Over time if you keep ruminating over bad situations day after day, week after week, month after month, your personality is only going to keep deviating from who you really are. If a year passed by with you having the same thoughts and memories float through your mind, eventually you would look at yourself in the mirror and say “Who even am I?”
That question you’d ask yourself comes from a simple truth that what you think about the most defines who you are. What I want you know today is that if you don’t get your thoughts together, your personality and destiny could be altered forever.
I don’t say this to add unnecessary fear to your heart. I come bearing good news. I come to give you hope. But in order to receive this life changing hope you must know that truth first. The truth is what will set you free.
Your World
With these persistent negative thoughts; with these persistent memories of bad times in your life, your personality would change and so would your world around you.
Your relationships would change in quality because you wouldn’t be yourself anymore.
The love you had for yourself would dry up because these perpetual thoughts you’re having don’t support love.
Your patience would start to wear out thin because your temper would be shorter.
All of these things would alter the beautiful fragrance and essence you have as a woman. All because you kept thinking about the wrong thing.
But if we flip the script and look at what would happen if after a heartbreaking or agitating situation, your strongest thought was this bible verse, the difference between who you are would be astronomical.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge God and he will make your path straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6
Instead of rehearsing what they did and how it made you feel, what if you kept Gods word at the forefront of your mind? That situation will surely try to fight for first place in your flow of thoughts but if you fought back to keep this bible verse as the strongest, most repeated thought you had every day, it would quite literally change your life.
You wouldn’t be bitter because the word of God is refreshing. You wouldn’t be broken, for long anyways, because the word of God is full of restoration power. You wouldn’t remain sad because the spirit of God specializes in peace and joy.
Let me tell you…
I’ve had situation after situation happen in my life. You want to know what’s kept me? The word of God. I’m not going to hold you. I’ve been through the most eye rolling, backstabbing, heart breaking situations you can imagine.
- Expecting three babies and a natural home birth but leaving the hospital with only one child after an emergency C-section.
- My name being slandered and me being talked about behind my back just because I love God and am obedient to his instructions and somehow it makes “them” uncomfortable.
- Being tricked and manipulated by my own father.
- Being controlled and gaslighted by my own mother.
- Being betrayed by my blood sister and almost being put out on the street after she broke her promise to help me fight for Gods will in my life.
- Being oversexualized by men that should support me and have pure hearts.
- Being introduced to sexual activity too early and being molested as an innocent little girl.
- Being told by my grandfather, who was supposed to be old and wise, that I wasn’t hearing the Holy Spirit. Yet years later I’m living in the very promises he told me not to believe I was hearing.
- Being mocked by my entire family at family functions because I chose to stop being lukewarm and actually live for God.
- Finding out that the man the Lord appointed as my husband was sleeping with another woman while I had been in and out of spiritual warfare for almost two years fighting for our future marriage and future children.
Are you telling me I shouldn’t be heartbroken, angry, and upset right now? Truth is, I have every reason to be. All of these things are in the past but I could very well bring them back to the present by thinking about them over and over again. Yet, I choose not to. I choose to make my strongest thought the words of the One True Living God who offers my soul eternal life.
Without the word of God my mind is like a grave where dead situations go to live.
Without the power of forgiveness my emotions feel like fiery darts that keep people’s missteps as targets.
Without the sweetness of Peace my days become compost piles that wreak of mold and garbage.
Without the word of God trauma would be my story and my personality would be altered because of what I’ve been through. But I don’t allow all of these traumatic situations, and trust me there’s more, to infiltrate my mind with lies every day.
Instead of wondering what I did to deserve these things and how they make me look to other people I choose to believe that despite everything I’ve experienced…
I am LOVED by God (Jeremiah 31:3)
I am FREE (Galatians 5:1)
I am having guaranteed VICTORY (Psalm 18:35)
I am a MASTERPIECE (Ephesians 2:10)
Choose Life
When you choose to let go of the big and small things in your life that happen to you, and keep God word as your strongest thought, your life will become full of the riches of Christ. You’ll stop smelling like what you went through, and talking like you have no hope. You’ll start feeling like a new woman while thinking on the promises of God.
I hope these words met a need in your heart today. More than that I hope that as my words run out on this page, that you flip open God’s never ending love letter to humanity and search your bible for heartwarming scriptures that refresh your soul.
With peacefulness and grace,
Jaleia Christine