Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Be still.

What was the first thing you thought of when you read that phrase? I’m going to guess that for some of you the first thing you thought of was sitting in church on a Sunday morning in a pew that was a little to hard and a lot to stiff for a little person. You probably had your colors and a bulletin to draw on and yet it was so hard to sit there the entire time, and I’m sure that your Mom leaned over to you a time or two and whispered… “Be still”.

Maybe you weren’t thinking that? Maybe you were thinking about the first time you stumbled upon a doe and her fawn out in the woods. Perhaps the mornings that you sit on the deck with your cup of coffee as a hummingbird buzzes close to you. Or maybe that day in the barn, on one of those cold February mornings when the steam rises from anything warm and the inside of your nose freezes as you step out into the cold. You walked in to find a cow tenderly licking her newborn calf. And in each of these cases you thought to yourself… “Be still.”

Perhaps you were thinking of your first trip on the double farris wheel at the state fair. Climbing aboard with your sweetheart and holding her hand as you went up and around again and again higher each time until you were perched high atop the biggest loop and the whole thing stopped in mid air, leaving you dangling high above the lights and sounds below. And you thought to yourself as you tried hard to calm your nerves…. “Be still.”

And if you think further back, you might remember yourself all dressed up, your face full of acne, wearing shoes that didn’t fit you quite right at a high school dance, when you first saw that person you had crushed on silently for the entire year. And she, or he, is coming towards you and then they are asking you to dance, and suddenly you are dancing and before you’ve even had the chance to really enjoy it, it’s over and they’ve kissed you on the cheek and run off, back to their friends and you thought…. “Be still.”

There are so many times in our lives when we allow our pace to outrun what we can actually handle. As humans, we take chances…that’s called living. Without those chances we can never really grow as individuals. Not all the chances we take in our lives are ones that bring us benefit. Some of them, in fact, are down right unhealthy for us, but with each chance we take and with each thing we learn from them we grow as a person. The key for all of us is to learn to know when to take those chances and when just to “Be still”.

I read this week a quote that I felt fits in with “Be still”. “God doesn’t ask for us to be perfect. He knows we all sin, that we are all imperfect. He never expects us to never fail, in fact it is through our failures that we become closer to him, because it is in our failures that he carries us and urges us onward.” I never try to be too preachy here in this column so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that quote, but it did make me think a little more about the phrase “Be still.”

“Be still”. Listen to the world around you. Take in everything you see, and feel and touch and taste. Know that there are times in this crazy life that we lead that we just need to take a moment and close our eyes and “Be still”. Don’t allow yourself to let it pass you by. Laugh in the joyous times and cry in the times that tear you apart, but remember to take a moment and “Be still” and really soak in those moments for you may never live them again.

More importantly the message in “Be still” for me, and hopefully for you is not in the use of the phrase as an action, but rather as a reminder. For when we feel that we have lost who we are, what makes us special and when the ones we count on no longer fill those rolls in our lives, please remember that God is there still. He will “be still” there whenever you need him, and just like that old friend who really doesn’t mind being waken up at midnight with a phone call saying “I need you”, there is nothing in the world that he would do for you.

Turn to him, know that he is there and that he will “Be still” and while you’re remembering that, remember to “Be still” for the special people in your life too.

See you next week...Remember, we're all in this together.