Accepting Reality

Accepting something does not necessarily mean we welcome it or even like it now that it's here. Acceptance means we stop trying to change what is. (Can you stand to hear one more person say, "It is what it is"? However, that is often the truth about the situation—it simply is.)

Some of us are cautious when it comes to acceptance. We are afraid it might mean pretending things don't matter. It does not. And neither does it mean becoming hardened to people and their problems—or refusing to recognize that we too have needs and problems. Accepting reality does not mean we are weak, apt to be a pushover for anyone who would take advantage of us. You can't push a rope.

Accepting reality means, among other things, that we stop trying to change situations that cannot be changed. This would include things already in the past. In our more rational moments, we know that we cannot change what has already taken place; we cannot make something "un-happen." Still, in our minds, we go over and over the situation as though fussing with it once more will surely yield a different outcome this time. Our energy should be poured instead into working with the present situation to transform it into what it ought to be, here and now. Take advice from "Mother Goose," apparently a very wise old lady. A rhyme from the seventeenth century says,

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

Other situations cannot be changed because we do not have control over other people's attitudes and actions. Accepting reality means we release the idea that we do possess that power. (I'm not suggesting that we give up on socializing our children and others for whom we are responsible, but even there, we are limited.) We cannot make another person change. We have to accept that they are the way they are. We may not like or approve of their behavior and we may encourage change, but we cannot make them do so. Force does not work. Other people too are like a rope that cannot be pushed!

The Serenity Prayer is the common name given to some lines, written perhaps as early as 1934 and originally untitled, attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.

These modern writers are only echoing what Jesus said:

4"I've told you all this so that trusting me, you will be unshakable and assured, deeply at peace. In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties. But take heart! I've conquered the world."

4"If I make you light-bearers, you don't think I'm going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I'm putting you on a light stand. Now that I've put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you'll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven."

4"I will talk to the Father, and he'll provide you another Friend so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can't take him in because it doesn't have eyes to see him, doesn't know what to look for. But you know him already because he has been staying with you, and will even be in you!" (John 16:33; Matthew 5:15, 16; John 14:16, 17)

Marjorie

Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 2003 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.