On June 26th of 2021, one week before my wedding, I got a call from my wife-to-be on her way to a dress adjustment for a bridesmaid.

“The transmission light just came on. If I drive any further it’s gonna go.”

My mom picked her up and took her the rest of the way while I frantically called my mechanic to try and figure out what to do. We were supposed to drive to our honeymoon two hours away after the wedding and being without a car for the craziest week of our lives would be inconvenient, to say the least.

Our mechanic stopped by for a quick look at it. It was toast. A good friend offered to lend us her car for the next little while so we could get to our honeymoon with no issues and look for something when we got back. It was a crazy start to a marriage.

The next six months were more of the same for us. After a long process, we bought a second car we were really excited about and took it for a road trip to my wife’s hometown in Nova Scotia. Everything went really smoothly until the brakes stopped working. We took it to a mechanic in Halifax. It was toast. Again.

Three fruitless visits to used car dealerships and one last-minute flight home and we were exhausted, carless, and nearly broke. We bought a third car and both started new jobs, desperately hoping we could get to some kind of stability and security after such a whirlwind.

My whole life I’d been given slogans for this kind of situation.

    “Just wait on the Lord.”

    “Cast all your anxieties on Him for He cares for you.”

    “Everything works for good for those who love Him.”

I can honestly say that they weren’t empty for me. I believed them and God had never proved them wrong. 

We were always delivered and something good always came from difficult situations. That didn’t change that I was tired. “When does this get easier?”

I knew that it was important to trust in God and I even knew that trusting in God through a difficult situation was often the first step in getting out of it or at least seeing some redemptive power in it. I just wanted to know what it would take for me to get to a point in my life where I didn’t have to actively trust in God anymore.

Trusting God as a newly married twenty-something was okay but eventually, I’m going to get tired.... Trusting in God is exhausting. I was living on a never-ending roller coaster; finding something that promised lasting security and always being disappointed.

If I’m being honest, I believed that if I trusted God through enough difficult situations, I could earn myself a state in life where I didn’t have to worry anymore.

The problem in my thinking was that, every time I thought I had reached that point, something would crumble under my feet. 

Maybe it was being short on our finances one month, or job instability, or a falling out with someone I loved; the only constant was that something would fail, it was just a matter of what and when.

My wife is an ardent lover of the little book “Searching for and Maintaining Peace” by Fr. Jacques Phillipe. I had read it almost a year before and the thesis of the book kept coming back to me every time something in my life fell apart.

Fr. Jacques proposes that before we can even begin to see victory in the battle against sin in our lives, we first have to win the battle for interior peace. Peace is the disposition from which we can start to experience victory over everything else. We find peace through ultimate trust in God over everything and in every situation. Anything else that promises to be there for us when we need it will ultimately disappoint.

Wanting stability isn’t a bad thing. It’s a desire that is ultimately meant to push us towards God because He is the only thing that can satisfy that desire. The problem arises when we let our peace be shaken by putting our trust in something else. If our house is built on the solid rock of faith in Jesus Christ, like the Gospel writer Matthew shares in Matthew 7:24-27, we will never be shaken but if we build it on the sand we will be swept away.

Marriage so far has been a crash course in this reality. Ultimate peace, stability, and security come from trust in the Lord. When I accept this reality, I find that rather than being exhausted from the roller coaster of instability, I am free because no failure, no struggle, no broken down car can ever take away my peace.