This Advent season, I’m reflecting on how I can balance the busy preparing by preparing in stillness. Yes to family gatherings, gifts, Christmas-letter writing, and Christmas cookies. But even more yes to quiet reflection on Christ’s birth.
It’s still hanging.
In our backyard — I can see it as I look out my office window — is a hanging branch. It hangs twenty feet in the air, dangling on another secure branch, threatening to drop with the next windy night. But it hasn’t fallen. Three or more years. I keep expecting to find it on the ground. I worry when we’re working or playing in the yard on a windy day that it might fall and do harm.
Yet no. It hasn’t.
It’s still there. Even when it’s not still.
During this season of Advent, when we sing about silent nights and solemn stillness, I am too often filled with so much movement.
Not stillness.
There is much to do as I prepare my home, fill stockings, dip pretzels in white chocolate, open my home to friends and family.
Preparing in this busy-ness is so easy for me.
Preparing in stillness? Oh, that’s hard. If I am doing nothing? No boxes are checked off my to-do list. Unproductive. Waste of time to sit in stillness. I measure my worth this way.
So I’m going to take a hint from that hanging branch, and I’m going to be still even when everything around me is not still.
How will this be?
It scares me to be still, to do nothing. I’m not talking about taking a nap — although that is a lovely thing. I’m not going to sit and knit — although I need to finish my daughter’s long-awaited afghan. Nor am I going to write or meditate or color or read or even listen to music. Although all those things may certainly bring stillness to my soul.
This time around, I’m going to just sit in stillness. I have a chair near my Christmas tree that looks out to our front yard. I’ll be still there.
It’s not a timed thing. I might be still for twenty seconds. Maybe three minutes. That’s not my concern. It’s not a race, a contest. or a challenge. It’s a longing.
To be still.
In that stillness, I will remember He is Lord.
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
Psalm 46:10 (ESV)
I lift my eyes and see stockings and nutcrackers and flameless candles, unwrapped presents for children of prisoners, gifts for shut-ins, an imperfect Advent calendar with devotions I’ve missed and a Christmas tree candy jar filled with red and green candies.
I remember in the stillness then that this — this glorious mess — is all about Him.
How about you? Is it hard for you to be still? To do nothing except rest in the knowledge that He is Lord?
This post was prompted by the word STILL at Five Minute Friday link-up where I join some wonderful Christian writers to encourage each other and share weekly posts. When you have time, check it out and you’ll find lots of inspiring posts to read on the same topic.
Photo by Ethan Cull on Unsplash
