The house is still.

Yes, that’s rare.  Just now I stood in the kitchen, breath held in the silence, and asked God, “What do you want me to do?” The house is clean (relatively speaking) and emails are (mostly) caught up. Posts are written. Lunch is eaten. (Mousetraps are set.) I have no big project looming at the moment. It feels strange.

What, Lord, do you want me to do?

Be still and know.

So I came, sat, talked with Him.

How do we mind the gap? The gap between where we are and where we want to be. Where we are and what we’re trusting God will do. The waiting place. The period in between, the waiting, the space in the middle where there is no movement.

The space that’s still.

My heart, so restless, resists this rest. We are addicted to movement, are we not? I tell Him, “When I see movement I know You are there. When it’s still, just so still, it’s hard to see You.”

You see?

When there are no ripples, how can I be certain He’s in the water with me?

But perhaps the ripples are simply hidden in the fog?

Florence Chadwick’s story often haunts me. She swims for 16 hours across the English Channel, then quits in the fog, later finding she was only 1 mile from the shore.

She says, “If I could have seen the shore, I would have made it.”  Ah, yes.

Perhaps the greatest temptation to quit comes just a mile before the shore, when the fog clouds our vision and the stillness feels unbearable.

God, I don’t see you doing anything.

Like disciples in the boat, tossed by the storm as Jesus sleeps: “Aren’t you going to do something?!”

“You of little faith; why are you afraid?”

Afraid of His stillness in the midst of my storm?

But His stillness isn’t His absence.

His stillness is His presence. And the thousand gifts we count remind us of His presence. Even His movement, at all times.

So although my restless heart loves movement, makes it easy to detect the fingerprints of God, I am learning to see His hand in the stillness.

The shore may be just on the other side of the fog. Ripples of Him may be hidden, but they are there.

Because He is there.

“The LORD your God goes with you;  He will never leave you nor forsake you.” Deut. 31:6

Rest.

{Thanks for reading.}

8 thoughts on “When all is still”

  1. Thank you Lord for using Kari to write Your Words of encouragement to so many woman. Thank you Lord for encouraging me today that You are present in my waiting place as I have seen You in waves in my life in the past few months and now You and I are simply to be still together as I wait for the next ripple. Help me Lord to be immersed in You despite the “calm” and the waiting. May I grow closer to You in the waiting so the wave of life does not have to be so big this time. Amen.

  2. Well spoken, Kari. Resting is hard and I am always wanting to fill the gap with something. Thank you for this post that is very timely for me and my family.

    1. Praise the Lord for His timing. Oh me too…always wanting to fill that gap. Thanks so much for your encouragement, Holly.

  3. Thank you for sharing this today. I REALLY needed to hear it. Hurry up and wait has been the story of my life lately.

    t.

  4. This is just what I needed to hear today. Thank you for whispering these words of grace to me. I am currently in process of writing a book, and at points it all just seems so overwhelming. Why? How? Where is the end? Is there an end? Yet I know that God has called me to this, that this is God’s work, and that God will get me through. Be still and know…so much there.

    Thank you.

    1. Oh Rachel! I hear you, dear sister. I am in the same process…. the LOOOOONG process. He says to do it, we must obey, right? Right! But the waiting process is hard, long. Bless you girl, I’m praying God strengthens you in the process!

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