It’s not often in London that we stop. All day, every day there is so much noise, so much action. My life is full of it; working, seeing friends, socialising. When I have nothing to do I’m trawling through social media, playing games on my phone or binging on Netflix. None of these are bad things, but so rarely in life do I stop, sit in silence, and enjoy that moment. Maybe it’s true for you too, we find it so hard to be still, we constantly have to think about what we are going to do next, or which filter we’re going to use to instagram what we just did. So rarely are we ever truly in the present. In the book of Exodus, after the Israelites have escaped Egypt, we read:
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“The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.””
“Come up to me on the mountain and wait there.”
We get the phrase “wait there”, from the Hebrew verb ha’yah: which means to be, become, come to pass, exist, happen or fall out.
God said to Moses, come up to me on the mountain and be with me. Don’t think about coming down, don’t even think about what you’re going to do. Just be with me on the mountain. Often we come to God with our agenda, we already think we know what we are going to get out of being with him. Or we forget that God is omnipresent, that he is everywhere we go, we pray asking God to come to our churches, homes, situations. But the reality is that he is always there with us. In every moment, every day, the God who created the cosmos is omnipresent and available. We just need to pay attention to the call from God to be.
In her new book, Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans wrote a beautiful poem about the Holy Spirit. Entitled “Breath”, it goes through the different Biblical metaphors for the Holy Spirit. You can find the full poem here, but this is my favourite verse:
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“The Spirit is like breath, as close as the lungs, the chest, the lips, the fogged canvas where little fingers draw hearts, the tide that rises and falls twenty-three thousand times a day in a rhythm so intimate we forget to notice until it enervates or until a supine yogi says pay attention and its fragile power awes again. Inhale. Exhale. Expand. Release. In the beginning, God breathed. And the dust breathed back enough oxygen, water, and carbon dioxide to make an atmosphere, to make a man. Job knew life as “the breath of God in my nostrils,” given and taken away. With breath, the Creator kindled the stars, parted a sea, woke a valley of dry bones, inspired a sacred text. So, too, the Spirit, inhaled and exhaled in a million quotidian ways, animates, revives, nourishes, sustains, speaks. It is as near as the nose and as everywhere as the air, so pay attention.”
I’m writing this post from Berlin, and this became a reality to me yesterday when we went to Berlin Cathedral. Inside this stunning building is a small chapel they call the “Room of Silence”. It was here in the silence, in the stillness, as I breathed in and out focusing on the cross on the wall, that I started to pay attention. I noticed that God was there with me, pouring out his peace, pouring out his grace. As I took time out from the noise of my day, I was able to stop and be with the God who is always with me, I was able to pay attention.
God is with you, right now, whether you notice it or not. He is just waiting for you to pay attention, to stop musing over the past, stop worrying for the future, and be with him in the now. What if we took a moment every day to stop. Take ourselves away from the noise of our lives, and just be. Allow God to reveal himself to us, and notice his omnipresent love wherever we go.
So I invite you now to take some time. Stop what you are doing, don’t come to God with an agenda, just be with him, and allow his Spirit to fill you.
