CEASE STRIVING

Psalm 46:10. Many of you are familiar with the popular verse, "Be still and know that I am God." We put it on our coffee cups and etch it into our minds to remind us to stop and make time for God in our busy day.

Last night was one of those were you have hard time getting to sleep. Hannah and I were up late every night this weekend ripping up carpet and sanding the old wood floors in our 70 year old home. Maybe it was my internal clock being off, or just being too tired to be tired, but whatever the case, after 20 minutes of laying there I decided to read for a while. I should have reached for my Bible first but instead picked up my laptop (as is too often the case these days) and typed "staining hardwood floors" into Google. After browsing links for a while and picking up on some good tips I still didn't feel tired so I opened a medical fiction book that I've been reading for pleasure. After 15 pages, still no luck. Finally I reached for my Bible. There is just something about God's word that's different than reading other books at night. I think it's the fact that it not only calms the mind, but the soul as well. The Bible that I keep by me bed is different that the one I normally read, it's NASB translation and the other is NIV. Normally I don't pay much attention to the small differences in translation but I noticed one last night when I read through Psalm 46. In place of the words "be still" that I was accustomed to, "cease striving" jumped out at my off the page. "Cease striving and know that I am God."

What a difference two words make! Being still to me means taking a break from movement or a pause in the day to reflect on something important much like a car will stop momentarily at a stop light only to begin moving again when the light changes color. Stillness is a temporary state but ceasing is much different. To cease at something means to stop at it all together opposed to just taking a break; it's permanent.

What I realized as I thought about the differences in these two words is that perhaps I need to do less pausing in my life where I give my token of attention to God and move on, and change my outlook on things all together. Maybe I need to take inventory and cease with things being so much about me, and my plans and my worries so I can make things more about him.

How about you? Are you a pauser or a ceaser? Is your time with the Lord a short segway or even an obstacle to what you've got going that day, or is it the sole reason you exist? What if from the time we woke up until we went to bed at night, we stopped trying so hard to make it all happen on our own and simply enjoyed God for being God? I want to live more like that.