I Get Four Words In and Remember the Bins

Father, thank You for and then the bins.

That is genuinely how far she got last night. Four words. And then the bins, which go out Tuesday, and then the fact that she had not replied to her sister, and then the thing she said at work on Thursday that she has been carrying around, and then whether the car needs its service before or after the trip.

Somewhere in the middle of that she noticed she had stopped praying about nine items ago, apologized, started again, got to Father, thank You for and remembered she had not defrosted anything.

She has been told to be still. She has read the verse. She has it on a card somebody gave her, in a nice font, propped by the kettle, and the card has quietly become an accusation, because it seems to be describing an interior state she cannot produce on demand and has not managed once in about six months.

And the conclusion forming under all of it is that some people have minds that can do this and hers is simply not one of them.

That is your table. That is your list. And I want to look at that verse with you, because the word underneath be still is not the word you have been trying to obey.

What the word actually is

The verse is short and everybody knows it, and almost everybody hears it as be quiet.

Be still, and know that I am God.Psalm 46:10

The Hebrew underneath be still is raphah, and it means to slacken, to let drop, to release your grip. It is the word for hands going loose. Elsewhere it is translated let go, and in one place it describes hands hanging down.

And look where it stands. This psalm is about the earth being removed and the mountains being carried into the sea. It is not a quiet psalm and it is not addressed to a quiet situation. It is the instruction to stop holding on in the middle of an uproar.

Which means it is not asking your mind to go silent. It is asking your hands to open.

You are able to do the thing that verse asks. Not a state you have to manufacture. The written word says let go rather than go blank, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman who got four words in and remembered the bins.

Now let me say something about the list, because you have started treating your own mind as the enemy.

That list is what a responsible person's head does. The bins, the sister, the service, the defrosting: those are the contents of a life somebody is carrying properly. A head that produces them at nine at night is doing its job badly timed, not doing something wicked.

You are not being sabotaged by your own mind. The written word never makes mental quiet the entry condition for God. The Holy Spirit is not standing back from a woman whose head is full.

And now the card by the kettle, which has become a sentence you fail every evening.

Somebody gave you that in kindness. But you have been reading it as achieve stillness, and it says let go, and those are opposite instructions: one is an effort and the other is the end of one.

You are allowed to stop trying to produce it. Be still is hands opening rather than a mind emptying. The Holy Spirit has been present through every one of the nine items, and He did not step out at item two and wait for you to come back.