Learning to Wait

Psalm46:10 "Be still (cease striving) and know that I am God..."

There is a direct relationship between waiting in stillness and knowing God. When we cease our striving and our religious activity long enough to rest quietly in the stillness, we find that He is there. Jeremiah 29:13 says, "You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart." This seeking and searching has been mistaken for activity and in a society drunk with accomplishing more in less time so that we can get even more done, most of us do not have the vaguest understanding of what this means.

The activity associated with searching and striving is for those who are unwilling to exist in the quiet places of the soul where God accomplishes great works that are largely unseen. He tells us to be still and in that stillness, that waiting....there He is found. And that is the great secret of seeking. Waiting is not passive and fruitless, a waste of precious time. It is an intentional repositioning of ourselves at His feet, knowing that transformation will surely come. Waiting in stillness is the divine mandate that most of us miss and so He must orchestrate our circumstances in such a way that we are forced into periods of waiting. But when we embrace this waiting and this stillness we find places in our own souls that we did not know existed and it is there that we see the reflection of His face, the branding of His image. And that is where we are changed and transformed. Sue Monk Kidd defines this paradox as "achieving our deepest progress standing still."

There are divine pockets of waiting throughout life that hold deep treasures and it is only the ones who are willing to embrace the stillness and to wait on Him that discover that this treasure is but more of Him. For years I wrestled with this, acquiescing on the outside but resisting and resenting within. It has only been recently that I have wrapped my arms around this thing called waiting so that I might discover the depths of truly knowing Him. Give yourself permission to pull away, to cease so much activity, to engage in quiet waiting. The "knowing" is worth all the "waiting".