As I write this, I’m sitting at a meeting table in the lodge of beautiful Brown County State Park.
My calendar labels this as “faculty retreat.” Retreat is academic language for working sunup to sundown with forced “fun time” in the evening. It’s an annual part of my “other” job as a seminary professor.
At the moment, we are filling in the hours of what started as a blank weekly planner. It’s mostly full now. Of course, every item is important. None is to be missed if we want to do our jobs right.
If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to squeeze in time to teach my classes.
I’ll return from this retreat with a full plate of professorial and pastoral duties, along with a pasture fence to repair, manure to shovel, and responsibilities as a husband and father. Maybe I need a retreat!
I suspect many of you have calendars even more full than mine. We do so much, and it seems that more is always being expected of us at work, at home, and even at church. We need a break!
While I am a firm believer in making time for sabbath rest, a day off at least once a week, sometimes I can’t wait for that day. I need a mini-sabbath now.
That’s when I remember one of my favorite Bible verses, Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Stillness, in the midst of busyness, is where we can meet with God. It doesn’t require a lot of space. It can happen on your chair amid a budget committee meeting.
It doesn’t require a lot of time. It can happen in the moments between the school bus picking up the kids and your getting into the car to drive to work.
What it requires is our willingness to be still, to stop what we’re doing even for a moment. To breathe even one still breath. To take the worries of this world and, for that moment, heed the advice of the prophet Elsa: let it go.
And what happens when we do? We know that God is God.
Lately I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is an outspoken atheist. He is also a brilliant scientist. I doubt any of us could argue for the existence of God against a Dawkins and expect to win. We can no more “prove” that God is than an atheist can prove that God isn’t. But we can know.
We can know when we enter the stillness where, even for a moment, the chaos of life ceases to exist. When time and busyness and noise stop, there is nothing left but God. Be still, and know.
Phil Baisley is pastor of Greenfield Friends Church. This weekly column is written by local clergy members.
