Where Can I Turn for Peace?

There are times in our lives when we feel we are lacking.  Lacking in what? Everything.  That has been me lately.  Student teaching has been the most challenging thing I have ever done add on top of that crippling anxiety, a husband who lives 50 miles away during the week, and the random stresses of life.  It's been hard.

I am in an environment everyday that challenges me, challenges my faith.  My spirituality has taken a nose dive and I know it's because of this large task before me, and I know it is one of the tools of the adversary to remove you from your one source of true peace.  

As I've sat alone most days, rocking, and trying to ward off an anxiety attack so that I could work more a question has come to me repeatedly, where can I turn for peace? 

I would sink lower and lower and ask almost out loud, where can I turn for peace?  I knew that this phrase was not coming to me repeatedly by random, but rather by sweet, personal, divine, design.  I knew it was a song, but I couldn't remember if it was a hymn or not.  This Sunday I sat next to Phill in church, and the sacrament was being passed.  I hadn't been able to go to church for a couple weeks, because of illness.  Again the phrase came to me again, "where can I turn for peace?" I looked it up in the hymn book and there it was.  I read the lyrics and could barely see through the tears forming in my eyes.  It was everything I had been feeling that I had been too angry, too cloudy, too distracted to express myself.  My despair, fear, and doubt all wrapped up in this song, with the answer to my question, "where can I turn for peace?" 

Where Can I turn for peace?

Where is my solace

When other sources cease to make me whole?

When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,

I draw myself apart, 

Searching my soul?

Where, when my aching grows,

Where when I languish,

Where, in my need to know, where can I run?

Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?

Who, who can understand?

He, only One.

He answers privately,

Reaches my reaching

In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.

Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.

            Constant he is and kind,

            Love without end.

The last line of the first verse encompasses my emotions that last couple of months.  Searching my soul, trying to remember what it was like to feel that love of my Savior, and my Heavenly Father searching my soul daily, trying to find the answer of where peace could be found. Where can I run, I should have known to run to my Savior when I felt myself so seriously lacking, but that's the true power of the adversary, his ability to alter your belief of your worth.  

He answers privately, reaches my reaching.  In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.  In a chapel on 7th street this Sunday I was reaching, and privately and sweetly He reached back.  Giving me a new motivation to remember that a soul cannot be lacking when it knows where peace can be found.  I am so blessed to be a part of the glorious gospel!  Despite the imperfections of the world, of people, and of myself there is always one constant waiting patiently for our return, no matter how long the absence.  Where can I turn for peace? Savior and Friend, love without end.