By Dina Aldabbagh

Little peaces, little peaces everyday. Yet they steal our future freedom. Our future comfort. Confidence. Peace. They certainly help you get through today, but the bargain has a price: I will give up some of my freedom tomorrow in exchange for relief today.

There are two kinds of peace: momentary peace and lasting peace. Momentary peace is actually just relief. It’s something that soothes us in the moment, that allows us to delay facing pain, and that helps us temporarily ground our emotional state in something else. 

It is a “peace” and “security” that we seek through temporary means, but it provides relief only as long as we do that thing. It won’t last longer than its own duration. These daily “peaces” are our easy path. They are how we attempt to help us escape pain in this moment right now, or delay that which we are afraid is coming to us. 

These attempts to soothe ourselves happen in ways we all recognize: food, Instagram, Tiktok, work, movies, smoking, drinking, even social plans. They are our coping mechanisms, our escapes from stress, our tactics for the avoidance of something. There are also the more abstract things: seeking certainty, clarity, resolution, hiding your feelings from someone, avoiding conflict, people pleasing, not responding, not facing a situation, not risking rejection.

We know how to relieve ourselves. These daily peaces do work. They soothe us for the moment. However, going forward, they make us doubt ourselves more, check ourselves more, feel more confused, and less confident. 

Then there is a different kind of peace, what I will call “God’s peace.” This is a peace that supersedes the relief of “I’m okay because the thing I was afraid of didn’t happen” or the destresser of “I’m okay because my circumstances are finally secure.” It’s bigger than a certainty that tells you “Nothing bad will ever happen to me.” 

This is the kind of peace that is rooted in something much more secure than the moment’s circumstance or emotional state. It’s not only rooted in trust for what your life story is, but also in yourself. We obviously cannot control every circumstance, or avoid every loss, but you feel a different type of peace when you walk into a moment of life and know, “This is who I am. I am me regardless of whatever is standing on the other side of me.” It’s the peace you get when you have mastered something.

UFC fighter, Khabib Nurmagomedov, is a great example of this concept. When you watch his press conferences, he has a very different energy than other fighters. He’s not like the boastful, overly sure ones who smack talk their opponent, hinging their confidence on the breakdown of their opponent’s. Nor is he one of those fighters that comes with something to prove — not to others and not to himself. He’s not Rocky. 

He is something different. An unhurried kind of confidence, without a plea for the moment to prove he is who he thinks he is. Instead, for Khabib, it seems like he was always just getting exactly what he believed he already deserved. The championship belt? He believed he deserved that long before he got the opportunity to fight for it. 

Why? How could he feel like he deserves something before he gets it? Because he has done all the work. He has complete security in himself. So he can be humble, yet simultaneously entirely sure of himself because he has real peace with himself. Everything he has done — all that work — that’s what gives him that confidence. It’s peace sourced from reality and truth. He knows what he’s done.

You can only walk into the most elite league a sport has with the sort of confidence he does when you can back up who you are. He famously said in an interview, “What do you think if UFC puts me versus Nate Diaz? What he gonna do? He wanna stand up with me? I think I can fight with Nate Diaz, Connor McGregor, Eddie Alvarez, with all these guys — same night. Like co-main event, main event, backyard, back stage.”

This isn’t that fleeting peace; it doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from doing the required thing over and over again until you’ve mastered it. And then still continuing. For his entire life, he trained three times every day. He strictly rested between each training session. His devotion to being a supreme mixed martial artist led to him having mastery in that octagon. Not once in all of his professional fights did he even shed blood. No one cut him. No one really rocked him. So when he said, “I can fight all these guys the same night,” he meant it. 

He commented in an interview once that his dad would come wake him up early in the morning to train, and he didn’t want to. Here is the difference in peace. Temporary peace is resting in bed a little while longer. That would surely be more peaceful than getting up and right to work. However, look at what it gave him long-term. In his career, not once did he see himself being truly challenged by someone. He went in and mauled everyone he opposed, exactly like he said he would each time. 

The real peace was that down the line, he was so sure in himself because he had already done all the work. He had faced all the hard moments already in his training. He didn’t avoid pain, he confronted it. Over and over again. He invested more than anyone else. So when the time came, there was no question in him — he was completely secure. 

That’s God’s peace. The life we live in is always trying to sell us on other forms of peace, that which are temporary. But worthwhile it is to make the choice today that leads to genuine peace in oneself. This is the only time your body will actually relax — where your muscles stop being tense, your jaw unclenches, and you don’t feel that pressure in your chest in the moment of reckoning. 

God’s peace will absolutely ask something of you. It’ll ask you to endure, to face your fears, to sometimes do what you don’t want to do, and other times not do what you do want to do. But ultimately, it gives you proper security. It gives you a feeling in yourself that does not trouble you, but instead makes you unafraid.

Khabib was unafraid. He, of course, noted the possibility that he could lose, but claimed it would only happen, “if someone got a lucky punch.” That was it. While possible, there was a very small chance for that to happen, because he knew his training. He knew how much he had already put in, learned, faced, and overcome. He knew that he had a response for anything his opponent tried, so the only thing that could take him down was a lucky punch. He wasn’t afraid of what was to come — he just acknowledged the small possibility that due to his humanness, he could get caught. Otherwise though, he knew he was safe. 

In John 14:27, Jesus says to the disciples, “Peace I leave with you! My peace I give to you! I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid” (NIV). 

We have ephemeral peace — as most people understand “peace” — and then we have secure peace. An ephemeral peace is something you do, or don’t do, in the moment to feel better in that moment. But secure peace is when you feel completely at ease with whatever the world gives you right now because you know who you are, what you do, and what you get. You know your story. 

You know what kind of friendship, romance, career, house, and success is for you. You know because you are the exact kind of person that aligns with all of those things. Security comes from knowing that who you are and have been is the exact kind of person who gets what you want in the future. Or, at the least, that you have done your honest part. 

If you act in a way that gives you confidence today, then you will be confident tomorrow. All of our actions today are the foundation for our actions tomorrow. We don’t just view ourselves based on how we behave right now, but rather how we have been behaving. We think these quiet moments of our lives don’t matter, but they do. They’re forming the person we are tomorrow — specifically in the way we feel about ourselves. 

To overeat tonight is okay if you are stressed. There’s no where to go. No one will see you. But when you go out into the world, and are constantly self-conscious in your body, your peace has been stolen. 

Remember the advice: do not be troubled and do not be afraid. 

That’s why those temporary peaces are temporary. They make you feel good now, but don’t actually align with the peace of the future you want. 

We can want something so bad, we could think about it constantly, and yet, still never get that thing as long as we prioritize the present discomfort. Whether it’s eating, checking, understanding, avoiding, resting — of course, the relief we get from it is real. That’s why the behavior persists. It’s not that you’re stupidly choosing something you know will make you miserable. You’re choosing something that genuinely makes you feel better now.

Though, the indulgence in not having to feel today’s discomfort has a price. They may seem so innocent. Like, “Surely, this one time won’t hurt me.” And, sure, not approaching the girl you like today is okay. You’re young. You have so much time to talk to girls and find the love of your life. If today rejection feels too scary, you can shut down and let that be a problem for tomorrow. 

Not training this morning won’t undo all of your progress. But when you are in the ring? You want to know that you’ve given everything a human being could give to be a champion. You will not feel peace in the moment of pressure unless you trust that you have done your part.

Everything has a price to it; there’s always a tradeoff. I think if that thing is costing you your future peace and confidence, the cost is too high.