“Be still, and know that I am God” – Psalm 46:10, es

“Cease striving, and know that I am God” – Psalm 46:10, nasb

The problem with personal reflection is that it is personal. This topic is tough for me and I find myself wondering why. I think it’s because I equate “Being still” with not accomplishing anything. You see, I am coming down from years of being a workaholic. For many years I tried to cheat time itself. Lately, I am trying to replace “busy” with “focused and intentional”.
Some workaholic tendencies I believe were born of a bad economy. We graduated from college in the eighties into a terrible recession. For the next thirty years, corporations would be downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, insourcing, globalizing, and in general striving to do more with less. We were rewarded for our dogged and determined efforts, for our busyness. We were never encouraged to “Be still”, and certainly never uttered words like “Cease striving”.

We all need to sit and ponder, not just sit and achieve or produce. There are words like “hurry” and “busy” in our vocabulary and we have embraced them. They have helped us achieve another word, “success”. But is our success the same as God’s? What does success look like to God?  Does it look like overwork?  Work is important but so is rest and reflection.

Many people had parents who encouraged hard work and ambition. While this is mostly a good thing, it perhaps led to adults who valued activity over inactivity. A four letter word in our house was “lazy”. Interestingly enough, another four-letter word, “busy” was very much encouraged. We had a counterintuitive saying at work “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”. Often that busy person would be an overworked person who made every minute count. They would remind me of the movie “The Incredibles”, where the mom had arms that could stretch way beyond her living room.

“I’ll sleep when I’m old”, I used to think to myself, and even on occasion say out loud, to my untroubled slumbering mate. I would be ruminating about some problem at work or thinking through the details of household management and my husband would be sleeping like a baby. I was very jealous of his ability to shut out the world, rest, and not worry about today or tomorrow. “How does he do that?” I often wondered staring at his closed eyelids. I think one magic ingredient in my husband’s ability to sleep is that he has me, and I am not sleeping. One morning he cheerfully quipped, as well-rested people do, “The laundry fairy washed, folded, and put away all of my clothes while I slept!”. “Yep, the laundry fairy sure is a great gal”, I said sarcastically, as I wiped the four hours of sleep from the bags under my eyes.

Many years ago I heard Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speak at a women’s conference. She raised three children before returning to school and starting her career in her mid-forties. Her motto was, “You can have it all, but you cannot have it all at once”. Such sage advice from a very successful woman and world leader, and here she was talking across a crowded auditorium, right to me sitting way in the back, I thought.

Over the years we tried to build some relaxation time into our hectic lives and sometimes even succeeded. And on Sundays we tried to rest. I would go to church and I must confess, I would sometimes sleep during the sermon. It was a beautiful restful sleep, one without interruption, and one with a subliminal and hopeful message. “Be still and know that I am God”.

Today I am neither overworked nor too busy. Today I am procrastinating. I am putting off working on a project for art class. This is because it requires serious, focused attention. It requires that I sit still, and quietly concentrate on the details of drawing, maybe for hours. I will have to actually carve out a large chunk of time to complete this task. I will need to put off things like laundry, raking leaves, dishes. Even in retirement, and even for a single art class, I am having trouble with “busy”, with slowing down enough to complete something requiring this much time and attention to detail. You cannot rush art. So I am fondly calling my art project, a still life drawing, “Still Life with Procrastination”.

The world is moving at a frenetic pace and so are we. it is good to stop and read, to reflect, and yes, even to try something new like a drawing class, to shift gears and get into a different mode. To “Be still” and know that God is bigger than any “busy” tasks we might facing.