Be Still

About four years ago our family had a charity yard sale on a hot day in July.

The Lord had blessed us with a good number of customers, and so we had done well.  But I persevered into the afternoon hours in spite of the heat. The reason for that is because I find that the hardest parts of having a yard sale are setting up in the morning and taking it all back down, so I don’t like to take it down until I’m pretty sure that no one else will be coming.

At one point that day, my then ten-year-old son climbed up into the shade tree and sat there for a while.  It was just him and me at the time; I was sitting in a chair in the shade of that same tree.

He started talking to me about how he liked it up there (and by the way, he would like to have a tree house), and he said that he felt closer to God up there.

I thought that was an interesting thing for a ten-year-old boy to say.  I mentioned that maybe it was because he was being still.

As the afternoon wore on and temperatures soared to almost 100ºF, I was the only one there, sitting in front of the fan, looking through the leaves at the blue sky, and I felt close to God, too.

I wonder if such experiences don’t have something to do with getting a different perspective on things and being still long enough to let God speak to us and show us a bit of His perspective.

I wonder if taking our focus off our normal, daily tasks, pleasures, and sometimes misplaced priorities, might not just allow Him to do something He has longed for since He created humankind, to have communion with the people He created.

Being still that afternoon opened up to me the excitement and unknown wonder of discovering something new about God’s awesome creation — I had never heard nor seen woodpeckers interacting like I did that day, nor had I ever seen a nuthatch so close up.

God shifted my focus from my daily world, to another part of the world which gets along just fine without my input, control, manipulation, opinions, or advice, another part of the world where God takes care of things, just as He wants to with us if we will be still and let Him.

“Be still  and know that I am God.”  Psalm 46:10a

or as the NASB says it “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

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