Dear friend,
Today is a soggy day; a drizzly, cup of tea and fingerless gloves kind of day. It is very still outside, just the rain making circles in puddles.
Mindfulness tells us to slow down enough to notice the world around us, to grow grateful for what we have and to live unhurried. I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes when I create space for space I am just restless inside, too busy in my head to do much more than make a show of thinking slow thoughts. And being slow just becomes one more thing to do.
“Our fast paced culture, our growing connectivity...our endless to do lists, and sometimes even the quietest nights that allow for our unfettered thoughts to get loud, oppose the communion that makes our hearts grow wildly deep.” (Unseen, Sara Haggerty)
We live very fast. We are driven by lots of different pressures and fears - the pressure to be successful, to achieve, to be there for others; fear of failure, fear of being alone, being inadequate, being too much...
Our culture celebrates our sense of inadequacies by pushing us to be more, to push on, achieve it all. It’s exhausting. The world asks too much of us. And often it feels like God asks too much of us too. I can’t manage to be good all the time; I can’t learn enough; I don’t have enough faith; I can’t share your love; I can’t manage praying right now.
I think too often I place the worlds demands on God. God isn’t really asking me to DO anything for him. He just wants me. He wants to be close. He wants to BE with me. To be with you.
“Truly my soul finds rest in God;
my salvation comes from him.
Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
He is my fortress; I shall never be shaken.” Psalm 62:1-2
In the psalms, we see David (and other poets/lyricists) encountering God, in a transparent, genuine way. They bring their often intense emotions to God and allow him to work on their hearts. They have this hiding place in God where they retreat to meet him. Where they find rest. Where they slow down and are restored.
“He refreshes my soul.” Psalm 23:3
I love that feeling. When I spend time with God and he rights my perspective and I feel deeply refreshed. Like my heart has stopped running and settled in his hands. I have never experienced that stillness apart from with Him.
Over the last few months I feel like God has opened up and made bigger this spacious place in my heart - a place to meet him and talk to him, a place to just hang out with him. I feel like the discipline not of “praying” as such but “communing” or hanging out with God, is underrated, but particularly important in our culture which is so very fast and pushy. I have experienced him restoring me in a really beautiful way. There is a deeper sense of “shalom” (Hebrew word for peace but it really means tightness and wholeness.) He has slowed me down in order to teach me that I should put rest first.
If we can’t stop and be with him underneath it all, then we can’t work out of rest, we are constantly working towards it. I used to aim for rest— mentally thinking “once I’ve done these 3 (or 300) things I will sit down and rest”. But how often do we actually get there and manage to feel peaceful and satisfied not just knackered! Or aiming for a holiday or Christmas, trying to do enough stuff to ensure I can be still and present and peaceful when I get there. But then I find I’m running too fast and I sort of collapse instead of resting.
So I am beginning to learn that I need to practice stillness, I need to practice slowness and I need to practice being in the transformative presence of Jesus. These things are first. They are at the bottom of the pile, before everything else. Because if I’m not at rest, then I’m not really living my life, I’m rushing through it til I can stop. (And that normally looks like crashing in front of the tv...)
So how can we live a life that comes out of a heart communion with God?
How can we have lives that overflow from a place of knowing we are perfectly secure in his love?
How can we go slow, present in our own lives, and seeing written all through the days what God is saying to us and singing over us?
Well it starts with Actually coming to Him. The first step is to just look him in the face and bring yourself, exactly as you are. Get yourself somewhere with no other agenda than to meet with Jesus. This can be physically or mentally (I often hang out at the beach in my head because I can’t get there for real). And then I curl up with Him, and I rest.
And so begins my life long journey into learning to live out of His rest.
But I think that’s a good start.
Katy x