“Be still and know I am God.” We’ve likely heard that verse, but in our culture of to-do lists and commitments, family obligations, and chasing our dreams, it can be hard to know how and when to “be still.” Where do we start? What does it look like to “be still,” and what can God do in our lives when we choose to listen to His quiet whispers in this loud world that can make us feel like we have to do it all?
(in)courage exists as an online community committed to making safe spaces for women to connect over topics just like this one. Every Wednesday this month we’ll be sharing some of our stories about discovering the blessings of being still. We hope you’ll read along and then join us in a weekly Community Challenge geared toward discovering who God is calling us to love and some practical steps we can do together.
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I have been in bed for five days now. Getting up only to change into a different t-shirt and pajama pants or hobble to the bathroom.
I have a cup of water lingering on my bedside table and a dim lamp for the hours I’m awake. I take small sips through a straw when I have to take my medicine.
The kids come and go, asking questions about school and can they have this snack or that. They’re proving self-reliant and my daughter has made me a huge stack of Get Well cards in swirling cursive letters and glitter glue. I’ve slept mostly. Or cracked the lid on my laptop here and there to check in before the nausea and pain pushes me back under the covers.
I have an audio book I can’t recall when I wake, but I reset the chapters anyway and listen to them while I lie still. I’ve struggled to hold thoughts well and reading pulls my eyelids down heavily and drags me back to my dreams. I always awake in pain when the pain medicine doesn’t stretch quite far enough to cover until my next dose.
I spent the night at the emergency room last weekend when an abscess in my tooth got out of control, my sinuses were involved and stomach issues from the antibiotics I was on before. The doctor tried to make sense of my charts and my blood work and the CT scan and ended up concluding that I was indeed in a world of pain.
I sat as still as I could, eyes closed to the whirl and rush of patients and doctors hurrying about with charts. I stilled myself, trained every muscle to hold its place and tension and breathed in slow deep breaths to attempt to manage the pain radiating through my jaw and into my chest. My eyes were sealed shut even as tears leaked through and rolled down my cheeks. I didn’t bother to collect them in a tissue. I just waited.
We all know to hold still when it hurts. It’s our first instinct to pull into ourselves and try to brace that broken part. We protect our pain like a broken-winged bird, shielding our wings from flight. We know we are bound and we want to fight against it but for the brokenness.
I came with the hopes they would figure out the mess of me and the pain I couldn’t shake. Then they did and the pain eased into a silky watery dream, and I found myself home again with doctors’ orders and prescriptions and a hankering for my duvet and pillow.
“Rest,” he said, “that’s the most important thing you can do while you’re getting your strength back.”
The first day was easy. Bolstered by prayers and strong medicine, I rested, getting my strength back. I’ll admit by the third day, I am not very good at it.
I have always had a restlessness in me. Stillness doesn’t come by me naturally. I am frenzied or fatigued, but the stillness it takes to heal is elusive. I’ve always fought God when I’ve felt pinned down. I’ve always wrestled in the silences and the stillness. I can quiet my limbs and my lips but not my mind. My mind always fights the seeking when I’m backed into involuntary stillness.
I wonder sometimes if I’m more afraid of the quiet from God or of the surety of His voice when He does speak.
On the third day, I felt a little better and ventured downstairs to survey the ruin. I checked in on school lessons and recalculated how long it’d be until our summer break with all the missed homeschooling we’d had. I expected to be greeted with scattered toys, dishes inches away from an empty dishwasher, and leftovers sitting out on the counter. But my mom had swept through and helped put my life back in order. I said a silent prayer for helping mothers everywhere.
Still, life flies at us, past us even. I checked my inbox and the mountains of unreturned emails. I checked my calendar and saw bright red boxes warning me of deadlines and goals and meetings.
I thought I might be able to handle one meeting instead of rescheduling it and soon found myself sitting in our public library so bleary-eyed and tired I wanted to flop down on the floor and crawl under the table, cover my face, and cry into my palms. I went home, stripping my clothes off as soon as I closed my door, and crawled back into bed.
I had overdone it. Pushed too hard.
So I spent the whole day in the fetal position whimpering and trying not to move anything. My husband came home to my soggy tear-stained pillow and a wife who seemed to be getting worse instead of better.
In the chaos that surrounds being still, when the world moves on at a steady pace and you cannot keep up, it is hard to not want to push through the stillness. Stillness often means waiting.
No one wants to be a burden.
No one wants to be passed by.
No one wants to feel like they are going nowhere at all.
But in it all, sometimes God is telling us to be still. Sometimes God is healing broken parts. He is building our strength while we wait on Him; we need only be still.
Because stillness makes space for God to heal and speak and nurse us back to Him.
So many of us are limping along, broken, bleeding out, and we’ve put on our brave face and determined to at least stand, to at least make some valiant effort on God’s behalf. But really, God isn’t asking for our tenacity as much as our surrender.
He is asking to carry us.
Let yourself surrender. Go limp and yield to the arms of the Almighty. Be carried along, find your strength in the waiting, in the stillness, be healed. For soon, you will be renewed, you’ll find your wings and take flight again.
“Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” {Isaiah 40:30-31, ESV}
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Community Challenge: This week let’s ask God if there is a place we need to still and let Him work. Is there somewhere we’ve tried to patch up and carry on but we’re really hurting and our brave face isn’t working? Would we allow ourselves to be held, to be healed, to be still and let God work in us, believing He is faithful to do so?
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