When you are spending the week with three little girls who take after their cousins who were fondly nicknamed “the raptors” when they were very young, it is hard to imagine calm and serenity. But right outside the window I can spy the ocean and its rhythms calm my worst instincts. Each of us has “a calming place” where one’s heart rate lowers, blood pressure goes down, and our mind, our heart, and our soul harmonize. For me it is the beach, but for each of us our calming place is different. For others it might be the mountains, a comfortable chair, a bass boat on a quiet lake, or as strange as it might sound amongst the sounds and noises of a busy city street. When I was a young boy I had two calming places. One was amongst the limbs of our neighborhood’s climbing tree and the other was my closet. I can’t tell you how many times I sought refuge in my closet with a flashlight, a book my parents didn’t know I was reading, and on a few occasions a handful of my grandmother’s cookies.
God implants in our DNA a draw to a calming place, and experience tells me that most of us don’t visit our calming place often enough. The pressures of our twenty-four hour society need to be balanced by individual calming places. Find yours and visit like Democrats should vote — early and often.
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