Awakening To Sunrise Over A Lake

I've just returned from three days spent with three good friends at a house on Lake Lydia in East Texas. We played golf, talked, joked, reflected, rested, and ate enough fried food to make taking Lipitor mandatory. There was no TV, no radio, no newspaper, and cell phone coverage was absent most of the time and spotty the rest. It was refreshing to find that I not only survived, I came back with a renewed determination to step aside more often and listen to the voice of God.

Psalm 46:10 tells us to "Be still and know that I am God." The term translated as "be still" can be rendered in a number of ways: stop, cease, be quiet, do nothing, pause and let it sink in. How many times in a day, in a week, even in a year do we do exactly that? For me, the answer is certainly "not nearly enough." We tell ourselves that there's no time, that we're too busy, our work is too important for us to slow down for even a minute. I respectfully disagree.

During my specialty training, I once had to take a couple of days away to tend to some type of family emergency--one that seemed terribly important then but which I've now forgotten--and I apologized to my senior resident, Dr. John O'Rear, for having to be gone. He shared this bit of wisdom with me. "Sometimes you have to step off the merry-go-round--but when you get back on, you'll find that it kept going around without you, and you're pretty much in the same place anyway."

Seeing sunrise across the lake, thinking about the phrase, "Be still and know that I am God," reminded me that sometimes we all need to step off the merry-go-round. I'm glad I did.