Be Still Is Not Do Nothing

Nine minutes is his record and he has tested it more than once.

He knows this about himself the way you know your own shoe size. He has known it since school, where it caused him a certain amount of trouble, and in his thirties he found out there is a name for some of it and that was useful, and it did not change the nine minutes.

So every time this subject comes up, and it comes up a lot, it goes the same way. Somebody says the phrase. Be still and know that I am God. It gets said in a particular voice, slower than the rest of the sentence around it, and everybody in the room nods, and he nods too.

And what he hears underneath it, every single time, is: whatever this is, it is not for you.

He has tried. He wants to be clear about that with somebody, one day. He has sat in chairs. He has sat on floors. He has gone to a retreat, once, in his forties, and lasted a day and a half and drove home at four in the morning feeling like a man who had failed a test everybody else passed in their sleep.

Fifty-two years old, and the doorway everybody describes has a chair in it, and he cannot sit in the chair.

If you cannot sit still either, come and walk with me a while. Nothing here is going to ask you into a chair.

Read who that sentence is actually spoken to

Here is the verse, and then here is the thing about it that almost nobody mentions, and once you have it you will not be able to unhear it.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

Now go back and read the psalm it sits in. The earth is being removed. The mountains are being carried into the middle of the sea. The waters roar and are troubled. The heathen rage, the kingdoms are moved, and God speaks and the earth melts.

And in the middle of that, this line.

It is not spoken to a person in a quiet room trying to settle their mind. It is spoken into an uproar, and it is spoken to nations, and the Hebrew behind be still carries the sense of let go, drop it, stop striving, the way you would say it to somebody with their hands round somebody else's collar.

Cease. Stand down. Let your hands come off it and know who God is.

That is not a posture. That has almost nothing to do with a chair.

You have been reading a battlefield command as a piece of furniture advice, and you were never once disobeying it. Psalm 46:10 is where that sits, in a psalm about the earth being moved, and the same Spirit who set that line in the middle of an uproar is the one who takes a wrong verdict off a man of fifty-two.

Where a man like you already goes still

Now let me put it back into your actual week, because a correction that stays theoretical does nobody any good.

Ask yourself where in your life your hands come off. Where do you stop working the problem. Where does the arguing in your head go quiet.

For a lot of men it is not a chair. It is the third mile of a walk. It is under a car with a tool in your hand and the radio off. It is a stretch of road, or a boat, or a fence line, or the forty minutes of mowing that your wife thinks you do because it needs doing and which you would do if it did not.

That is stillness. That is exactly what the psalm is describing, and it has been happening in your life for decades, and nobody ever told you it counted because it did not look like the picture.

And notice: it has been going on without you naming it. Which means the thing you have concluded about yourself since school is not only unkind, it is factually wrong.

You are already still in the sense the psalm means, and you have been for years without knowing what to call it. That sentence belongs to Psalm 139:3, where God is described as being acquainted with all a man's ways including his going out and his lying down, and His Spirit has been present in every one of those third miles.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, this outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.

And everything above works exactly the same for a man eating three meals a day. The time we are talking about is any time you can free, and I would say the same words to somebody who freed it by turning off a television.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been one step behind anybody here, and you were not behind at that retreat either. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives on the basis of what a person actually has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who drove home at four in the morning feeling like a failure.

If today has more weight in it than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.