Yesterday, while doing my workout, the trainer looked directly at the screen and said, “find peace in the turmoil.” Boom! I don’t know why that hit me hard. But it did. I think because as I get older, I realize how necessary of a life lesson that is to learn. When you can’t figure that out, you will instead find your way to destruction. How do I know this? Because I’ve done it.

There are two ways to deal with turmoil. We can deal with it constructively or destructively. When I did the ladder, my turmoil only got worse and peace got further away from me. I was really good at faking it and a lot of the time I even thought I was happy. But whenever I got still and alone, my soul just wasn’t at rest. I couldn’t take the silence and went right back to the destructive behavior. Because when your soul isn’t at rest, there’s no way you can be at rest.

So how do you turn it around? Especially when turmoil gets so bad it buries you and you don’t even see a way out. At least that’s how it felt in my case. But it wasn’t true. I was lying to myself. There was absolutely a way out. It was just easier to succumb to the destructiveness and stay there. It would take work on my part and even facing pain to climb out of it. I knew looking at myself in the mirror would be hard. Taking ownership rather than blaming it elsewhere like I did in the past was gonna hurt. But what was even harder was living with a restless soul. And what was harder than that was seeing the toll it was taking on people that loved me.

So, in my weakest moment and deepest hurt, I finally fell to my knees, looked up and asked for God to give me His strength, because I had none. That my friends, is called surrender. Surrender is a word that is usually known as “giving up.” And in some ways, I did. But this kind of surrender felt good. I fought so hard against it for so long but when I finally did, my whole world changed.

The change didn’t look much different from the outside and it was a slow process. Still today I evolve with this new approach. But what was immediate was on the inside, my soul found peace. I knew I didn’t have to depend solely on me anymore. I knew that if I turned to prayer and the power of God, my peace would return every time. I look up now and I say, “I know you got me God!” And he does.

So, when you’re feeling like you are at your weakest, like I felt at the end of my workout yesterday, don’t take the easy way out. Remember there’s a power to rely on that’s greater then yourself. And that is how you find peace in the turmoil.