A Battle of Wills

In the quiet of the night, as I settled down to sleep beside my husband in our peaceful home on our peaceful street, we heard gun shots reverberate across the city. While I was drifting to sleep was someone bleeding, perhaps dying, from those shots we heard? This morning as I drank my tea was another woman sitting in a hospital waiting to hear whether her child was alive or dead from those bullets?

I've been back in LA for a year now. In many ways, it's been a very good year for me and my family. But the challenge of living in this vast cosmic soup of peace and violence, love and hate demands constant spiritual vigilance. I have to reach above the ripple effects of gunshots and pain to find the peace of God.

I felt rattled this morning. Reading the Homicide Report didn't help. Young men killed while the city plays. I got up and got busy, trying to lose my unsettled state of mind and spirit in busyness. But, it was no good. I needed quiet time, prayer time. Connection with the Lord.

How can you stand it, Lord? I ask. How can you bear witnessing the grief the violence leaves behind?

And the answer comes. I'm directed to this passage from A Course in Miracles:

Unshaken does the Holy Spirit look on what you see; on sin and pain and death, in grief and separation and on loss. Yet does He know one thing must still be true; God is still love, and this is not His Will.

And so I remember. We live in a fallen world. But God is still Love and he reaches out through time and space. He's constantly calling. We simply need to listen.

His Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So Be It,
Mother T