Be Still, Then, Be Loved
He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
“Be still you dummy.”
Thus saith the Lord to me in prayer this morning. Saith, of course, with endearing love and playful teasing.
I am a frantic person. My mind is racing more often than it isn’t. I’ll go from hours of YouTube film analysis, to remembering I’m hungry, to crushing noobs on Overwatch, to recalling I’m leading a men’s group that night, to having a sudden craving for Taco Bell. And, gulp, I’m 28 years old.
Much of this restlessness, I find, is a compulsion to avoid stillness. Essentially, even in procrastination, even in rebinging Stranger Things, even in literal prayer, worship, podcasting, and reading scripture, I refuse to sit and remain in the places where God actually speaks.
The voice in my head, which I not so affectionately call Chad (sorry to any of the nice Chads out there), is always on the move to get me on the move. It’s as if Chad and the enemy are co-conspirators against my ability to stop and be loved.
Beloved, a term I’ve written about dozens of times before and will likely do dozens more after this, yet something so hard to believe deep down to the core. It is the heart of the Gospel, the simplest of notions but the most complicated to contend with in our souls.
And even after practicing and putting in the work to pray in the morning regularly, read scripture (infrequently, to be fair), and do all the groups and sing all the songs and listen to all of the sermons, still, STILL, I find it hard to believe the most important thing to believe.
Why is that?
If the heart of the Gospel is one of the easiest things to understand, even for children, then the enemy will use our own story, the negative one we have received as children, to distort and complicate it and keep us unanchored. Unbelieving. Unloved.
Because we can’t be still.
Doing homework for my men’s group, I came across a section all about secrets. Interestingly, the curriculum illuminated that secrets aren’t always about bad things we do. In fact, the reason we even keep secrets about the bad things we do is because we hold onto the secret about how bad we think we are.
Now, just like the term Beloved, I write often about shame. I’m a 4 on the Enneagram after all. I’m dealing with this nonsense all the time. When one thing I’m ashamed of is revealed and healed, another thing creeps up only days later. Shame won’t necessarily be killed once and for all, save for judgment day itself. To be fair, it is dealt with: by Jesus, by the cross, by the resurrection, and by fellowship. You sure bet it gets lessened and weakened. Yet, I wonder if our frequent blindness to the current shameful thing we believe isn’t at the root of our inability to receive the love of God. From Him, from brothers and sisters, from significant others, from friends.
It’s almost as if we can only be loved so much as we are known, and we can only be known completely if we reveal completely the places of our shame. And again, I’m not strictly talking about our shameful actions.
I’m talking about fears of abandonment. Insecurities about how we look. Avoidance of expressing feelings at all. Worries that we are incompetent. Concerns we aren’t far enough in our career and/or life goals. Anxiety that we are loved or liked only because of what we do or say and not because of who we are.
Here’s a list of a few of mine, and I know, 100%, I am not alone. Think to yourself. What are the shameful beliefs you have about yourself? Where are you hiding your hurt that God can’t heal because you refuse to reveal? What do you think will happen if you do reveal them? To God? To those who love you? To yourself?
Much of this is best processed with mental health professionals. Which, hopefully three years from now, will be someone like me! Getting help so that you can help yourself isn’t weakness, it’s precisely strength. Paul seems to think so otherwise he wouldn’t have written about it so profoundly.
Yet the question remains, how then can we be still? Find where we believe in shame? Stop hiding from the love that would halt the shame?
The first step is diagnosing whether you feel God’s love at all. And, if you don’t, no shame at all.
Because we have all been there.
I attended a smaller group of church members, pre and during quarantine, dedicated to putting spiritual disciplines into practice. It included but was not limited to: fasting, tithing, simplicity, prayer, worship, leadership, etc. It was drinking from a fire hose of a few thousands of years of wisdom in a timeframe of nine months.
So much of it went right over my head, but one thing that has stuck is an established rhythm of morning prayer. And even writing this, this is by no means a prayer life of a spiritual giant.
It’s often minutes thinking “stay focused, stay focused, stay focused, I hope she likes me, I HOPE she likes me, stay focused, she’s so pretty,” to “nothing, nothing, nothing, I’m hungry, nothing, nothing, ok, I’m really starving, nothing, nothing.” Some variation of these two is often my norm. Few and far between are great spiritual epiphanies worthy of entire blog posts let alone a humble brag to fellow Christian brothers and sisters about what God revealed from above directly TO ME.
Yet the one thing this certainly has done is given me a barometer of where I am at with God. Which doesn’t necessarily mean I am aware of it right away.
The past week had felt remarkably off. I had gone out and drank too much with friends, locked myself away in isolation and Rocket League, and blocked deep achings of loneliness with habits I’m still in the process of breaking.
All of these behaviors, perhaps on varying levels of shameful actions, all point to shameful beliefs. But all I was focused on was the things I was doing. Not once did I honestly reflect on what I was actually believing.
How often do we do that? See what we do as bad, and then fast forward to believing we are bad? How often do we blur these things so deeply that they inform each other?
How do we even stop believing these things?
Vulnerability is all the rage these days, but implementing it versus talking about it are two entirely different things. Shame can fester, perhaps even more so, under weak and/or incomplete vulnerability. Slapping a bandaid on a hemorrhage doesn’t heal the hemorrhage, if anything, it only makes the wound bloodier.
Lines like “there’s just a lot of stress at work” or “I just feel pretty stretched at church” or “I just feel like my boyfriend is distant” are great launching pads, but are not sufficient to address the raw, emotional pain underneath.
Shame persists like a pervasive black hole, looking to swallow any light that comes near it. Therefore, it isn’t a mere flashlight or candle needed to obscure the powerful, pervasive “I’m not good enough” or “I’m incompetent” or “I’ll never be pretty enough” or “I’ll never be safe.”
For me, this past week, and the past several years, the phrase “broken beyond repair” leapt off my journal. And while I revealed it to myself in writing, it didn’t stop there. It took me being still, instead of freezing, fighting, or flying away from the feeling, to honestly reflect on what I believed. Yet after the stillness came the light of the Gospel revealed in brothers and sisters who are learning how to be still too.
Although there are many accounts in the Bible of the love of God manifesting to “restless” souls, it is mysterious how often in the Apostles Jesus asks people questions before offering healing, teaching, and/or redemption. Additionally, the only times He seems not to do that is when people come to Him already aware of what they need from Him.
It’s almost as if having that desperate awareness of what you need from Christ enables you to receive from Christ. Half-hearted, half-assed supplications won’t even get half-hearted, half-assed responses from God. Jeremiah records that we find God when we search for him with all our whole hearts.
I’ve only ever received from God this way, and I received this way only when I stopped, stilled myself, and understood, again, the core of the Gospel.
A message of a good God loving a broken world under a new kingdom of good news for the poor, physical and emotional healing to the physically and emotionally sick, and an ultimate conquest and defeat of the rulers, the principalities, the powers that be which work to keep us all stuck in our shame and therefore stuck in our sin.
Do not be deceived; although we do have a bent and sinful nature, in Christ, we are new creations. That is the old you, the old me. It has no bearing on the real you, the real me Christ is reforming and remaking and renewing every day with His new mercies. Some skirmishes will be lost in the war. Patterns of sin and selfishness will always come back resurging as desperate gambits to undo what can never be undone; that is, salvation and eternal life Jesus lived, died, and rose again for.
Shame is powerless against the overwhelming power of a loving Father, Son, and Spirit who were so stirred by the darkness felt, received, and perpetuated by their people that they took that very darkness into human form, into the very body of Christ, so that we might never experience the loneliness and heaviness of shame alone.
Christ felt our shame TOO. Not just the night drinking a few too many, but the tears you fought against by drinking a few too many. Not just the eyes glued to the phone screen showing fake digital intimacy, but the heart aching and crying for connection and knowness which settles for fake digital intimacy.
He didn’t just cleanse us from our sin, although, thanks be to God that He did. On the cross, on the third day, on the ascension, on Pentecost, He unleashed a light that the darkness can never, ever contend with.
The weight of human suffering, human shame, human loss and disappointment and despair and death is now eclipsed by the work of Christ.
It is finished.
Not just the sin, but the shame too.
So be still, and know… that Jesus is God.
You “dummies.”