Peace, Be Still

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise." - Psalm 111:10

I am amazed that I did not develop a massive ulcer while I was in college, and not because of my academic schedule. That I did without much effort. Papers were written the morning before and still garnered superior grades. Classes and tests about which I cared little I studied only enough to grab a passing grade and nary another thought was paid it. All in all, I did not struggle to obtain my degree. No, the stress and frustration came from my striving to attain the felt presence of God. At this, I considered myself a colossal failure.

What perpetuates both our frustration with, and our coming back to, personal worship times with God is the spiritual payoff we fill must be attained before we close our bibles and unfold our hands. So often it does not come, there is no feeling like we have been filled with some great new movement of the Spirit, and therefore we suspect perhaps we are seeking God incorrectly or half-heartedly. And so we nervously reach for new devotionals, new Bible studies, Christian living books, many of which are marketed as assurances that they contain the secret of truly bringing the reader to an encounter with the presence of God. And as far as the prayer aspect (for strangely, the contemporary view of what a personal time with God constitutes is normally a short devotional study coupled with a segment of prayer wherein is begged both inspiration and intercession for others), it is often the desire to hear God "speak" to us concerning his will. Absurdly, most of this desire is communicated not by our falling silent to heed God by slowing ourselves down, but instead by making our prayers grandiose and lengthy - after all, the longer the prayer, obviously the more faith is being displayed.

Today in a staff meeting, someone commented that the praise chorus, "The Heart of Worship" should perhaps be sung differently by many people - if they are being real with themselves and what they are wanting to gain from worship - as "I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about me, it's all about me, Jesus." In other words, we judge the genuity of our times with God on how much we get out of it, how inspired we feel after we have finished. We are self-centered and sorely mistaken people.

My pastor included a quote in our afternoon prayer guide yesterday. "You are a child of God ... in union. There is nothing to prove. Nothing to attain. Everything is already there. It is simply a matter of recognizing and honoring and trusting" (Richard Rohr). Likewise, during our time of prayer, instead of expounding relentlessly on the physical and spiritual condition of each and every person we interceded for, we simply spoke their name quietly and the group prayed in unison, "Peace. Be still." Could we want any more for a person, spiritually speaking, than that?

Perhaps it is this simple truth that all of us who strive and scrape for an epiphanal experience with God need to remember. Instead of gaining some grand, inspirational word from our Savior and Redeemer, we should instead hear him inaudibly whisper to our souls, "Peace, be still. Where is your faith? Peace, be still. Do not be afraid."