Be Still
These two words have been something that God has been bringing up over and over again in my life. In fact, this lesson started about a year ago while I was living in Knoxville. It really started when God uprooted from the church that I had settled into shortly after moving to Knoxville. This is the church that hosted the college ministry that I attended. So I went to that almost every week, and occasionally I drug myself out of bed and made it to church on Sunday morning. In fact, I had just gotten into the habit of making it to church most Sundays mornings the summer before the start of my Senior year of college. I was comfortable there, and had no desire to search out anything different. Then, I went to church the Sunday after returning home from my internship in Arkansas, and then went to the college ministry, and realized that the college ministry was the same service as the Sunday morning service. For about a month I felt like I didn’t need to search out someplace to worship on Sunday mornings, I had become comfortable with this. Then in my quiet time God spoke, it felt almost like like a bolt of electricity, I knew I needed to find a church to go to on Sunday mornings. But why? I only had a few months that I would be in Knoxville before the World Race would begin. I didn’t understand at all, but I began to search out a place to worship on Sunday, unaware of what God was about to teach me.
I visited several Baptist churches because that’s the denomination that I grew up in and knew, but nothing felt like a fit and I was quickly getting discouraged. Then God led me to visited Church Street United Methodist with a friend and everything about it felt new. I then felt the need to revisit the church about a month later, and it was in the service that I heard an almost audible voice from God tell me “this is home.” I began to attend this church and realize that God was teaching me more through the newness of the tradition than I had ever learned from anything in my life. He taught me so much about being reverent and made communion really real to me. The lesson I didn’t realize was having the largest impact on my life was just to be still, and worship doesn’t have to be anything big.
So many times in my prayer and worship life, I feel like I have to bring something to God. I feel obligated to pray a really long prayer or read my bible and journal for hours. While all those things are great ways to spend time with God, they aren’t was worship/ prayer HAS to look like. I learned that God wants us to just come to Him and be in His presence and spend time with Him. I have learned that it is just ok to sit in the presence of God and just rest in His peace.
This is something that I have wanted to share for a while now, but the other day we had a teaching on creative worship. I got the chance to just sit with God and draw and be in His presence and interact with Him through art. This was the first time that I had heard about this concept, but I felt God in a new way and I knew that this is the part of my life that He had been teaching me to be still in. So that I can just be still even when my life is chaotic and I’m living with 45 other people in a foreign country.
“Be still, and know that I am God! I will be honored by every nation. I will be honored throughout the world.” Psalm 46:10
