2016) STILL

Written on August 25, 2016.

After weeks of woven wonder and focused fascination, my person and I found ourselves with a stack of days in which much could be done, but nothing has to be. An assortment in which we can do anything or nothing. We have done much of both.

Tonight with a medley of moments yet before us, I pause perched in the place where sunset cuts in upon daylight, that it might have the first dance with the moon. I linger with the Lender of Light, absolutely acquainted with the thought that He could turn off the stars. Yet He stuns me with their shine. He could melt the moon, but molds it mighty and majestic for my memory instead.

And in the large and little of it all, I meditate upon the verse that has dangled like a pendant from my heart during the days nil and sum.

The Lord will fight for you and you have only to be still.
Exodus 14:14

I ruminate upon it with no awareness or alert that there is waging war or blazing battle surrounding me. However (an incredible meaning of still), I am met and melded to the truth that I am within a world with broken borders and buried bombs.

And that is when it settles and sears, scorches and seals. To be in the world but not of it, is simply to be still. For when I am still, it feels that He is the only one who can move me. In stillness I recognize He has calmed a storm and I need not know the name it bears.

Placid and placed I can see the origin of all movement and motion. And separation comes between the movement He longs for my life to have and that which I think needs to be there.

Still isn’t stagnant. It is a pooled pond. A mirror where we see His hover and hang as He looks over our shoulder to our within. And our without. It is where whisper becomes wave. And where ready rends ripple, revealing the route.

Sometimes still comes so another can move or be moved. So I can. It is the place of pierce and potential. Purpose and power. For without stillness, there is no set apart and sanctify. There is only our way till we get there. It is the place we may call Him mad. For we would have done it differently. Moved faster, sooner. Gone a different way. Taken someone else with us.

Sometimes the world seems motionless when we move most. And there, we recognize that a reservoir within us, the still water we sit beside with Him, is stirred and stoked so we long for the never without Him.

Stillness is where a young girl said, “Let it be done” and an old man said, “I let go.” It is the place from which a kinged shepherd abandoned himself to create peace. It is the place in which I allow myself to be restrained, so He, my Holy He can be free.

I am stilled by star, song and splendor.

I am stilled when I catch my person watching me from across the room. I am stilled when a child that was within me and can clearly walk without me, takes my hand. Not so they won’t be lost, but because they are so very grateful to be found. And I am calmed and carried when a stone softens, a heart returns and a life is renewed and restored.

JOURNAL JUBILEE:
Ask Him to reveal to you the ways He created you to be stilled. And let Him show the ways you seek to shimmy and shake your way out of the still.