In times of distress, this concept is good medicine.

For daily strife, I medicate with poetry. I enjoy the ornamental prose of doting adoration. Old language may be considered primitive, but it’s the best remedy I’ve found to endure the routine burden of life.

But what about the times when life knocks you down? Not when you are weary, or discouraged by everyday demands, as that is frequent and expected. Rather, those times when your heart is crushed, and you cry out in desperation without control.

For this, the concept that everything I own, I owe is the only thing that brings comfort. I am not alive because of anything I did, therefore I have nothing that is a result of my own doing.

The raw materials of my body and the breath that sustains me moment by moment are a gift. There is nothing I did to earn them. What is more, I am completely reliant on these building blocks to merely subsist, much less to study, learn, love another, get a job, raise a family or do any of the pursuits that make up the things I have.

As such, everything I own, regardless how little or much, belongs to the one who gave me life. Accepting this puts even the worst scenario imaginable into perspective. It is the only thing that allows us to trust in a wisdom that far exceeds our own and give thanks in the most acute trials.

It is tempting to equate having wisdom to being able to understand greater meaning in life events. On the contrary, having wisdom means living by faith that there is greater meaning, but it lies beyond our capacity to understand.

Accepting this with the head and internalizing it in the heart are two different feats. We are called to work through it with reasoning, and also to experience it, feel it, live it, endure it. Often it hurts.

Inevitably we fall short. When the storm comes, we grow scared and place our trust in anything else. Only one person fully trusted in infinite wisdom, and it led him to death, so that we who don’t could have life.

Receiving this great act of love allows us to find the strength to trust with all our heart and lean not on our own understanding, as the Proverb instructs. In the storm it is difficult. Until we remember we are being asked to place our trust in the same one who created the storm.

There is an elixir beyond tinctures, vitamins and adjustments. Trusting this more than our own limited wisdom is a good starting point toward whole health. For even our wisdom and trust itself, we owe.

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