C.A.L.M. (10/12/2025)

I love spiritual acronyms like F.R.O.G. standing for “Fully Rely on God.” I was reminded of an old one recently, C.A.L.M. I learned it some time back, but I saw it again in an article.[1] And this time, I promised myself to remember it because I know it works. Calm does settle upon us when we fully and wholly believe that “Christ Always Loves Me.”

Remember when we were children and we sang the song “Jesus Love Me”? It not only made us more joyful as music tends to do especially those with hand gestures, but it made us feel loved because we believed the words we sang. They made sense. And singing the words made the words come alive and our faith solidify around them. Well, the same is true with C.A.L.M. As we slowly repeat the words, our minds settle, our hearts fill, and our nerves relax because we realize that we have Christ’s love which we know to be extremely powerful. Christ does not always love what we do or how we act, but Christ does always love us.

When on our journeys, when we have those moments where we feel that we can’t carry on, let us carry on nonetheless because we know we have what we need because “Christ Always Loves Me.”  One of my favorite passages of scripture says this in a different way. In Paul’s 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians he writes: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”  The life of Jesus that flows from us is the fruit of His love which he constantly gives to us.

Life in our modern era is “complicated”, or so they tell me. There is little we can be certain of and the uncertainty causes so much anxiety. But if we could focus not on what is unknown or uncertain but on what is known and will never change – the love of Christ – could we set down our anxieties and pick up the calm from knowing we are loved by Christ who had us on His mind as He hung upon the cross to win us life in abundance.

Until tomorrow, let us all love well.

[1] Dianne Neal Matthews entry for July 31, 2025, Mornings with Jesus.