Thoughts and feelings can whirl you away from being centred. The practice of stillness can calm the mind and bring back clarity. The Bible has verses to help us on the way."The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still", Exodus 14:14. Such an assurance it must have given the people of Israel as they left Egypt to go home. They didn’t need to panic or worry because God was right there with them. The invite was to be still.
Nothing is so one with the nature of God as stillness. To live a spiritual life is to live in the presence of God—to be still and know. Stillness is a deliberate act of the will, our response to Jesus’ love call to come and listen, learn, and abide. If we will discipline our minds to still our anxious thoughts and quietly keep watch with Him, the journey will begin to unravel its magnificent mystery.
All of life flows in an intimate proximity to the sacred. It is this proximity that endows everything that exists with ultimate significance, with supernal beauty and mystery. We live amidst the shimmerings and the whispers of such a Great Beauty, but the fog of inattention, fear, and anxiety descends over the eyes of our heart and obscures our view of Reality.
For me, stillness is about recognizing the presence of God who is already there. This is what makes our practice of stillness different than practices outside the Christian tradition. Other practices seek answers within a person’s own self or seek to connect to larger energies or “universe.”
We seek the person and presence of God. We become still enough to realize the Lord of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is not angry or distant but is our refuge in the midst of trouble, stress, need, and a big pile of work, my last instinct is to be still. God invites me to cultivate stillness as my first instinct.
I’m learning how to do this and I hope you are learning right along with me. Since i began this practice, I established a new morning rhythm of Sacred Reading, Scripture, and Stillness. Already it’s making a huge difference. I'm an over thinker by nature and this has had a huge impact on being an overcomer.
I am different on the days I practice my morning rhythm than when I don’t. It’s simple. It’s classically Christian. It is Biblical and available for all of us. Take a few minutes in the morning to just seek God's face. Make it habit, you will began to see a difference in your relationship with God.
Stillness allows the Holy Spirit space to awaken us and lead us out of the impenetrable mist up onto the high plateau of freedom and love. So, we make the choice to enter into refreshing stillness, quieting the negative voices, opening attentively, allowing the Light to pour into us and slowly dispel the fog that has crept in. Beauty awakens within us, and we become aware of the movement of God in the depths of our being—we remember Whose and who we are. He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. Mark 4:39 A beautiful story of Jesus in how he calms the storm story. This is a story to meditate on and use in your stillness practice.
1 Samuel 12:16. "Now therefore stand still and see this great thing that the Lord will do before your eyes." stillness allows God to act and show off His great power for us. We should be always be at the point of allowing God to be God in our lives. That goes off to surrendering and giving God the go ahead to intervening in our amidst.I want to challenge you in this season to just be still and watch God fight for you. Get to a point where you would command your storms to be still. Remember you can do all things through Christ who strengthen you.
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