Fingernails of Peace

I’m a chewer. No not a tobacco chewer. ;) A finger nail chewer. When I am thinking or stressed I chew my nails. My poor nails have endured a lot at the bite of my teeth. My cuticles and nails have been bleeding and sore many a time.

Clearly I think a lot!

This present situation I am currently going through was no different. For a long time my nails were brutalized.

And then without even realizing it I stopped chewing and gnawing on my nails like a dog on a bone. I wish I could say it was a conscious stopping in which I used super human will power and implemented a 30 day no nail biting challenge but then I would be lying.

In reality, it was a slow fade that I didn’t realize until a lady in a group I was in said something.

She said “I was admiring how peaceful you looked”.

It was a simple but powerful 7 words she spoke into my life. 

I looked at her for a few seconds just soaking in her words before replying and as the reality that I WAS truly peaceful washed over me, I replied “Thank you, I am at peace”. And I really meant it.

It was also at that moment that I looked down and realized my nails had grown. They were long and strong instead of chewed up and bleeding. They were fingernails of peace; a sign that micro inch by micro inch had been growing literally right in front of me over the past month despite my struggles.

I see them now as an ever growing sign of his indescribable peace at work in my life. A peace that no matter how chewed, or filed down or beat up I can let myself get in life, His peace will always grow back if I give it the chance, just like my fingernails.

Okay, back to what the lady said. To verbalize I was truly at peace to her and the group was NOT something I could have said just a few weeks prior because I was anything but at peace then. I was wrestling to reconcile hard concepts in my life and God didn’t seem in any hurry to meet my demands to help me understand. But like He always does, God slowly helped me put my struggles to rest. I say slowly because I was anything but willing to hand over my question slips to him without any answers. Ever patient, God reminded me that His answers would come when I really did need them and that He had everything under control regardless of how much I knew or didn’t know.

Do you ever feel like that?

That if God would just give you the answers you are asking about then you would have peace?

I am learning daily that answers aren’t the key to peace. They may temporarily assuage or confirm fears or truths but answers never administer peace. Only fully trusting in God and His power can give peace. 

My nails used to be a testimony of how much I was trying to figure things out instead of letting go of the things I just thought I could change or needed to change.

Now they are a testimony of the peace that has come from the peace that comes in handing over the struggles of life to God who is the only one who can do something about them anyway.