Ten Thousand Places

Life is never a straight line.  Even when you know your heading, you are often off course.  This is not a time to panic.  It is also not a time to swing the wheel at random, hoping to fall into line with another traveller, or to be caught in a current.  Movement seems reassuring, but we must make sure we are moving in the right direction.  Sometimes stillness is the thing.

 

My friend Adam quoted Brother Lawrence to me today, who said that if God is calling him to wash the dishes, it is in doing the dishes that God will meet him.  It doesn’t matter if he spends hours reading his Bible, praying, meditating, calling out to God.  God is waiting, patiently, for Lawrence at the kitchen sink.

 

So with rest.  God met Elijah in his rest, and ministered to him there, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”  If the Spirit of God is calling us to rest, it is no good to work all day and night, even — perhaps especially — in God’s service and in his Name.  God is patiently waiting for us in our beds, prone and unmoving, our posture as helpless and as trusting as a baby’s.  There are sermons to be written and preached, there are people who haven’t heard the gospel, there are hungry people who need to be fed, and lonely people who need to be noticed, but if God has said to us, “rest” we will not find him in the sermon, in the witnessing, in the hungry and the lonely.  He is in our own bed, where he told us to meet him, if we would only listen.

 

Good night.