Where do you find peace?

What do you do when you are totally stressed out? Like, when everything screams ‘you need to breathe air that doesn’t contain this drama’? When I can, I travel. When I can’t, I travel somewhere a little away from the drama I’m facing. Bottom line, I try to distract myself from whatever I’m facing, find some peace within.

I went running with a buddy a few days ago, and it was a lot of stress. Stress because I haven’t done anything remotely related to exercise (beyond running around/after my nephew) in a few months. And we agreed that we’d achieve 5k.

After the first kilometer, I could see my heart thumping in front of me, I was breathless, my belly was hurting, etc. (all the signs of a severely unfit so and so). We stopped to stretch a bit, and then we carried on. By the 3^rd kilometer I was throwing up bile. Lol. I was in so much pain! Ended up having to stop soon after because my knee started acting up. Like I literally limped home (not the whole way though).

Anyway, total distance covered? 4.5km. Time it took us to do it? 45 minutes, against the 30 minutes my friend would normally do the 5k in. Again, I was more proud of myself than disappointed (and you should be proud of me too)

When we were walking home, we saw this beautiful patch of flowers in a garden, and it was truly a sight for sore eyes. I really derived peace from looking at it, so I went closer to take a picture. Doing that made me think for a bit, and here’s what I thought.

As adults some days are great, others we’re just happy to get through, and some others are super horrid. In the midst of that strenuous run (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it), I found peace just by looking at ‘green’. I remember captioning this photo below on Instagram and saying…

Green is beautiful, and a reminder that there can be calm in the midst of chaos, and more importantly, God is always there, even in the midst of chaos.Sometimes all we need to do is stop, hand over things troubling us, and then just let Him do His thing.

So, question is, where do you find peace? (Apart from the very obvious question about your health and fitness, and if you like to run as well). 2014 has been a much better year than 2013, better by miles and miles. Doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been dodgy in its own ways, doesn’t mean there haven’t been days when I didn’t want to pull out my non-existent hair.

But God has been there, in the midst of everything. In the wings, under, above, and inside me; just ensuring that the waters don’t overwhelm me. And for that, I’m super grateful.