Blaming the issue on sensitive hearing, I have been known to physically remove the batteries from the back of clocks in friends’ homes when the irritating ticking prevented me from falling asleep. For this reason, the story shared by Leslie Koh describing a young boy’s discovery of a lost watch when others failed to locate it resonated with me, especially the boy’s response that he “just sat down and kept quiet, and soon I could hear it ticking.” Koh shares this imagery in order for readers to grasp the importance when Scripture “talks about the value of Being Still.” How else will we be able to hear the whispers of God? However, in today’s world that shuns the need for Airplane Mode, culture convinces us that to Be Still, to be quiet, to be idle is somehow viewed in a negative light.

Mirroring this story of the need to Be Still to locate a missing watch, a former colleague shared on social media that her pastor often asks his children, when they are on a trip or a hike, to stop, Be Still, and take it all in. He even sets a timer for 15 seconds so they can absorb the memory together. The reason behind this request is that it takes 14 seconds to imprint a positive memory and only three seconds to imprint a negative memory or trauma. This statistic communicates to me that I need to slow down, to Be Still, so that I can hear God’s whispers of direction, absorb the moment, and allow it to soak into a positive experience for me. If I just speed right past all the moments in life, determined to reach a specific destination, I may regret the loss of positive memories along the way and only be left with negative recollections of how I arrived.

Not only am I challenged to consider being intentional to not miss out on beautiful scenery on a hike, the request to Be Still might also come on an ordinary day at home when I Notice a Nudge to alter my plans, Unplug to Recharge, and listen carefully for what the Lord is attempting to Teach Me through Scripture, song lyrics, and the writings of others. It’s only in those moments when distractions are reduced to a minimum that I am able to slow down my racing thoughts and connect with the silence and truly find rest.

The necessity to Be Still becomes even more critical when one is facing, what Warren shares as “the dark night of the soul…a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant,” what I refer to as Raging Seas. Warren shares of a time when she “didn’t know how to approach God anymore. There were too many things to say, too many questions without answers. [Her] depth of pain overshadowed [her] ability with words…Adrift in the current of [her] own doubt and grief, [she] was flailing.” What she says helped her through was Compline, “the last prayer office of the day…a prayer service designed for nighttime.”

Unfamiliar with this prayer, I did what any scholar would do, I used a search engine to locate the words and found these: “Now that the daylight dies away/By all thy grace and love/Thee, Maker of the world, we pray/To watch our bed above/Let dreams depart and phantoms fly/The offspring of the night/Keep us, like shrines, beneath thine eye/Pure in our foe’s despite/This grace on thy redeemed confer/Father, co-equal Son/And Holy Ghost, the Comforter/Eternal Three in One.” What Warren is asking us to consider is when the worries of the world overwhelm us and we lay our heads down at night, maybe we should consider the need to Be Still and return to familiar prayers that “sustain faith over a lifetime.” Personally, Psalm 139 has become a repeated refrain, but I now might consider praying something similar to Compline. “…in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new,” perhaps returning to petitions shared throughout the years can bring our minds to a place of stillness and rest.

Warren shares in her book Prayer in the Night “about how to continue to walk the way of faith without denying the darkness.” I wonder if there has been a time when you relied on Being Still and found specific prayers or Psalms to comfort when you seemed to be Drowning in Doubt. If so, please share in the comments below as I’m sure many of us could benefit from your experience.

References:

Universalis Publishing Ltd. (2021). Compline: Night Prayer. Retrieved from http://universalis.com/compline.htm

Koh, L. (2021, February 11). “The Ticking Watch.” Our Daily Bread. Retrieved from https://odb.org/US/2021/02/11/the-ticking-watch

Warren, T. H. (2020, February 8). How to pray while drowning in doubt: From Prayer in the Night. Retrieved from https://renovare.org/articles/how-to-pray-while-drowning-in-doubt