Copy


BE STILL AND KNOW
 
You keep him in perfect peace
    whose mind is stayed on you,
    because he trusts in you.
Trust in the Lord forever,
    for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.
 
                                                               Isaiah 26:3-4 (ESV)
 
I’m an extrovert, yet in spite of that I do love peace and quiet. I avoid crowds and like to stay home a lot. Give me quiet time in my leather chair, accompanied by my Bible, journal, other books, and…and my telephone. Oh…I guess I need my computer handy too. Don’t want to miss an email coming in. And I like to send them out as well, whenever I feel I need to share something with a friend.
 
Is that peace? Not exactly, is it?
 
But can any of us live in the world and achieve perfect peace all the time? I think not. I think God wants us to be part of the community we live in and community is often noisy and busy. We have lives of work and play. We have commitments, which often means pressure. Troubles come and we’re filled with anxiety.
 
So much stress! How can we get away from it when we need rest? How can we find the perfect peace we long for, the peace Isaiah talks about?
 
A friend told me about her grandmother who lived in a small prairie house in the 1920’s with her family of eight children. Life for women was busy in those days. They didn’t have the modern conveniences we do, not even running water in the house. Whenever this lady felt stressed or tired, she sat down in a chair by the wall and put her apron over her head to spend some quiet time with God. Her children knew that this was a signal to be quiet. This mother had learned how stop her busyness and focus on God.
 
In the scripture above, Isaiah tells us that we need to keep our mind “stayed” on God. The wonderful thing though, is that we’re not on our own. We can trust God to help us. As we start each day tell God we belong to Him and ask Him to stay with us. If we believe He will, we will sense His peace.
 
We cannot create God’s perfect peace on our own. We receive it from God by accepting that He is the only One in control. He is present to us if we allow Him into our lives. This means praying our way through stress, pain and turmoil, with our minds stayed on God, even if the only way to manage it is with an apron over our head.
 
Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10
 
I pray for God’s peace to be with you today and all week.
 
marja
 
Copyright © 2014 Reflections by Marja, All rights reserved.
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp