Saturday, March 29, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Wordless 2
Come, let us return to the Lord. He has broken us but he will heal us.
Here is a sweet poem by former pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes:
Gracious One, I imagine your sadness
that we only pray for the stuff we want—
not for you, for your closeness —for your sake.
“Please fix this disease.
Thanks for the sunset.
Protect my child.”
There is so much I want,
so much I worry about.
I lay them all down.
I just want you. No stuff.
Let me be near to you.
Beloved, hold me close.
Not for me, but for you, for love of you,
may I always, most generously,
extravagantly, give myself to you.
Howard Thurman spent parts of every day in stillness. Who knows? Perhaps God will speak:
We must learn to be quiet, to settle down in one spot for a spell. Sometime during each day, everything should stop and the art of being still must be practiced. For some temperaments, it will not be easy because the entire nervous system and body have been geared over the years to activity, to overt and tense functions. Nevertheless, the art of being still must be practiced until development and habit are sure.
If possible, find a comfortable chair or quiet spot where one may engage in nothing. There is no reading of a book or a paper, no thinking of the next course of action, no rejecting of remote or immediate mistakes of the past, no talk. One is engaged in doing nothing at all except being still.
At first one may get drowsy and actually go to sleep. The time will come, however, when one may be quiet for a spell without drowsiness, but with a quality of creative lassitude that makes for renewal of mind and body. Such periods may be snatched from the greedy demands of one’s day’s work; they may be islanded in a sea of other human beings; they may come only at the end of the day, or in the quiet hush of the early morning. We must, each one of us, find our own time and develop our own peculiar art of being quiet.
Chaplain Charles Lattimore speaks from his own experience:
Being still has been a necessary part of my walk. Stillness, I should add, is not for me the same as emptiness. While the waters of the pond might be still on the surface, there is much life moving within. Life is within. Love is within!
When I am still I do not empty myself. I would rather be filled with love than have nothing within. And being still allows for this to happen, or rather being still allows for you and I to notice that this has happened already. The love is there within us, even now. Yet sometimes the waves of life rage so incessantly that it is difficult to see or feel that love.
Pausing and being still enough to notice love within and around is a deeply powerful and countercultural act. In the case of most of contemporary society, stillness is a prophetic act, defying that which demands that we move quickly and move upward. It challenges the notion that it is better to be busy and occupied. It refuses the call to be constantly distracted and perpetually plugged in.
Wordlessness becomes us, in the presence of the Lord, silence diffused within and without, rising like incense into heaven.
Let us strive to know the LORD;
as certain as the dawn is his coming,
and his judgment shines forth like the light of day!
He will come to us like the rain,
like spring rain that waters the earth.
(Hosea 6, Psalm 51, Psalm 95, Luke 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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