A Companion On The Way

There is a line in the Serenity Prayer that has been lingering with me lately: accepting hardships as the pathway to peace. It’s a sentence that doesn’t rush, doesn’t promise ease, doesn’t pretend that peace is found anywhere other than in the very places we would rather avoid.

The Stoics call this idea as the obstacle is the way. Therapy names it simply: the only way out is through. And spiritually, we learn again and again that grace is not waiting on the other side of our discomfort, it is present within it.

I’m in a season where I’m constantly being drawn to the idea that less is more. I’ve been winnowing down the years of accumulated things in my closet and home. This is giving me space to breath. Even spiritually, all the wonderful content creators I’m putting aside as I don’t feel the need to consume their podcasts and reflections. I’m perfectly content sitting with a poem, a prayer or a scripture passage having it marinate within me. I find that this is where the pace slows. Where the deepening happens quietly, almost imperceptibly, like my dry bones are taking on breath.

Recently I had lunch with a Anam Cara, a soul friend, and our conversation brought me back on course. The divine whisper I needed from another to help open my eyes to the fact I had had gotten off the path without even noticing. I went back back to my Rule of Life and discerning well.

I’m reminded in my being that peace isn’t the absence of hardship but the presence of God in the middle of it. It’s the grace of the present moment, unpolished, unhurried, unproductive by the world’s standards, yet full of life.

Perhaps this is your invitation to slow down, however painful that might be. To stop outrunning your own soul. To let yourself simply be. To “waste time,” if that’s what it takes to remember that you are not a machine but a human being whose spirit needs spaciousness to heal and expand.

Hardship doesn’t block the path. It is the path. And when we stop resisting it, even for a breath, peace begins to rise, not as a reward, but as a quiet companion along the way.