By Micah Weathers |
Contributor
Finding peace in everything you are currently doing is a struggle for many in this generation. The desire for more seems to be everyone’s driving force.
An Augusta woman who is a Catholic blogger, author, TV host, speaker, professor and mother finds peace in even the smallest aspects of her life. Rachel Balducci is a woman of many titles. As for right now, Balducci is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Communication at Augusta University. In addition to preparing for, teaching and grading papers from two classes each week, she also is a mother of five boys and a girl.
But that's not all. Once a year, in the summer, Balducci travels to Boston, Mass., to tape the television show “The Gist,” which she co-hosts with two other women, Danielle Bean and Carolee McGrath. The show discusses such topics as the family lives of Catholics, spiritual journeys of individuals and daily women's issues, according to CatholicTV.
As for Balducci’s life leading up to where she currently is, she had to learn how to discover peace while on the journey. She got married at 22 and still had other personal plans in her life to accomplish. Being married meant new responsibilities and new plans that were different from her original plans. At that time, she was trying to figure out how to balance her old plans with her new plans.
“I couldn’t figure out how to do my thing, have a bunch of babies and support him [her husband], so in that season I was like, ‘This is what I’m doing and I’m going to be at peace with that,'” Balducci said.
Throughout Balducci’s life, peace has been a necessity. She has always sought to enjoy the journey.
In Balducci’s most recent book, “Make My Life Simple: Bringing Peace to Heart and Home,” she writes about freeing herself from the hands of chaos into the hands of peace with help from God. She took her testimony of finding peace in her life and has provided help to those who are struggling like she once was.
Wanting more can be done and anyone can have it all through finding peace, she says. The enjoyment of each moment within the journey while not rushing to the next is where Balducci found her peace.
“As long as I found peace in just going with the flow of it instead of being like, ‘No, I’m going to make this thing happen right now,’ then I don’t think those opportunities would have been given to me because I would have been looking for things and it wasn’t the right time for those things,” Balducci said.
The pursuit of happiness for Balducci meant finding peace in the moment of time she was currently in.
She did not always want to be doing what she was doing at certain times in her life, like the time in which she was just a housewife. She still wanted to do her plans in those moments, but she found peace with where she was by trusting God.
Balducci viewed those moments in which she was doing what she had not planned as her obligation to God.
“There’s this woman, a Catholic woman, and Catherine Doherty is her name, and she talks about this concept of the ‘Duty of the Moment,’ and basically [this concept] is seeing that anything I’m doing right now is the thing God has asked me to do, and so I’m doing it for Him,” Balducci said.
Balducci says it is important to be flexible, and that she has to set her goals in concrete, but her plans in sand.
“If you’re willing to not say that it has to be done this way, then I think you can have it all,” she said.
For more information about Rachel Balducci, go to http://testosterhome.net or to buy her book go to https://www.amazon.com/Make-My-Life-Simple-Bringing/dp/1681922398.
Contact Micah Weathers miweathers@augusta.edu.