The Practice of Stillness

Exodus 14:14

“The Lord will fight for you; you only need to be still.”

Fantastic! What great advice for an activist. This verse was written just for me.The challenge is to internalise it.

The promise: God will fight for me! I am not alone. My resources are not the whole story. God is adding his strength to my capacity and together we will face each day's challenges.

Israel had a wonderful experience. God’s deliverance happened right in front of them. The impossible roadblock (the sea) became an amazing exit (God parted it!). If God can still do that, I want it.

The challenge: Be still! This is not my natural habit. I have to work at being still. My daily routine involves appointments, agendas, to-do-lists, action steps, measured outcomes and constant activity. That’s all great, but it can make me overly self sufficient. And when I face a serious problem (one the size of the Red Sea) I can too easily despair. Strange how I can forget to trust God and just worry about something that is plainly impossible for me change. I need to work on the discipline of stillness.

How can I practise stillness today?

Here is my short list of practical and personal ideas. This is a growing edge in my life. I am not good at stillness so this is a list of things I need to do better and more often.

1. Take God at his word and trust Him. Ex. 14:14 is a huge promise. I want to tuck it in my pocket and take it with me through the day. The Lord of heaven and earth will fight for me. That is decidedly better than my fighting for myself.

2. Sit down and pay attention to God. Literally sitting down, does help me. I am confronted by Jesus’ challenge to busy-Martha and his praise for quiet-Mary (Lk 10:38-42). I believe God wants to pepper my day with stillness. He wants there to be margin in my diary and quiet on my to-do list. The things that are impossible for me to "fix" need to be prayed about calmly and stared down in stillness. 

3. Expect the unexpected and expect it to be BIG. Neither the Hebrews nor the Egyptians were expecting the sea to open. Neither Moses nor Pharaoh saw that coming, but God did. What opening does God see coming today in my life? Constant activity blinds me to God’s magnitude. Today I will elevate my conviction that God WILL fight for me. I will expect more of God without telling him how (or when) to do it.

4. Exhale. It is uncanny how my physical posture and my mental/spiritual posture interconnect. Two or three minutes with my eyes closed and my attention focused on my breathing can be incredibly calming. As few as three deep, slow, sustained exhales can calm my whole universe. I picture Moses eying the fierce Egyptian army and exhaling very slowly. He knows what God can do and so he is calm. Huhhhhhhhhhhhh..... me too.

5. Talk to myself. My inner dialogue needs to be aligned with this wisdom of stillness. I need to tell myself: “God will fight for me”. I need to shout this loudly so other more common voices will be drowned out. Voices that say things like: “You haven’t solved that problem, you need to worry about it?” or "What kind of father/pastor/neighbour are you if you can't figure this out?" 

I will need to repeat this verse several times today. And I will choose stillness in the face of the impossible. I will wait for God, He has promised to fight for me!

Questions

How do you practise stillness? What works for you?

Where have you experienced God "fighting" for you recently?