peace, be still

As I have discovered the value of the written and well-loved prayer, one of my favorites has become a prayer “for quiet hearts,” found in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Often when I sit down to write here, my heart is not remotely quiet. There’s a lot of tension, disquiet, a sense of striving—for the right idea, the right words, the right way to explain myself. There have been times I’ve asked God if it’s time to be done, if after 15 years of writing on the Internet I have said as much as I need to say and the world has heard enough from me.

This morning in prayer, I asked again what the Spirit had to say to me. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I hoped for something obvious, like “Stop writing,” or “Keep going.” Instead, He said, “Be still.”

As translated by the NASB in Psalm 46:10—cease striving. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling that phrase and the Hebrew words it comes from. I picture a child’s sleeping body, utterly limp, or the perfectly still surface of a pond—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

As spoken by Jesus to the turmoil of the storm—peace, be still. Or perhaps a booming command of “Silence!” would capture the nature of His words more accurately. “And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm” (Mark 4:39b)—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

Or, as put by Moses in the face of a battle against the Egyptians—you need only to be still. To stop talking, to say nothing, to let God fight instead.

And so I release my own bracing for the impact of writing the wrong thing. I release my tension around disappointing the people I value. I am quiet, restful, limp in the hands of God, waiting to receive the word He might give me and refusing to willfully dig it out on my own strength or my own clock. Waiting for Him to do battle on my behalf.

Words keep failing me, and maybe it’s because words must fail eventually. Maybe it’s because it’s not possible to capture God and His heart and His work in the space of a few paragraphs of cold letters on a page. This has to be lived, embodied, touched, felt, known, seen, shared—for the first time I’m realizing I cannot have this walk with Jesus alone. I cannot have it online. I cannot have it only in my head, as if my truest self were just my mind, divorced from my body and heart and gut.

The convenient thing about an intellectual faith, a faith built on righteousness by good doctrine and knowledge of the Bible, is that it’s fairly self-sufficient and immensely scalable.

The inconvenient thing is it bears almost no resemblance to Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.

One is a formula I can watch on YouTube from the comfort of my home. The other is a fully embodied experience of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that can’t be mass-produced, faked, bought, or sold.

And so of course words fail—words, which I love so much! Words which I have spent my life honing, crafting, and using to express my deepest thoughts and feelings as I learn and grow. But words can’t help but fall woefully short of the truest reality unless they, like Christ, become flesh.

Israel had many words. The Ten Commandments are called, literally, the “Ten Words”—and they had hundreds and hundreds more commands than that. They had a whole history of kings and prophets recorded in writing. And still, the Word had to become flesh.

The knowledge had to become life.

The truth had to become human.

What good have I done, if I write a dozen profound books about Jesus but fail to live and walk with Him in my real, offline life? He says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”—and His examples are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, not writing brilliant essays of what it’s like to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

God didn’t tell me “Stop writing” but neither did He say “Keep going.” He said, “Be still.”

So in returning and rest, I follow Jesus, and I learn to bring my whole self—not just my head—into communion with Him. It is not scalable, nor even really shareable. But it’s all that matters.