During the Spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led cities to shut down. Stores and restaurants and bars and theaters were closed. The only people working were those consider "essential" for the minimal infrastructure of modern life.
Each day during that time, I would put in my usual 8 hours on my job, but not at my office. Instead, I worked from the solitude of my own home, remoting in on the computer. Along with all of my co-workers, we went through the normal habits of the workday from the totally abnormal locations in our homes
On the first day of my seclusion, I began a daily habit of leaving my desk at the end of the workday and walking out the door and directly to my car. I grew comfortable with working in solitude, but I never stopped wanting to finish it off by going for a drive and stretching my eyeballs.
I never actually went anywhere, never actually got out of my car. I might visit the drive through window of a fast food joint for a brief, masked interaction with an essential purveyor of Diet Coke. But usually I just picked a direction and drove around my city.
During safer times, I was a rideshare driver for Uber and Lyft. My workplace was rush hour traffic and the hustle and bustle of pedestrians downtown and on the university campus. Now, the rush hour was reduced to a trickle of traffic and the sidewalks and streets of the center city were mostly barren.
The stillness was surreal.
Some writers and preachers quoted scriptures about Sabbath and stillness, pointing us to a God-given opportunity in the midst of this horrible natural calamity. Some believers took thesis advice to heart and intentionally took time to treasure the stillness.
From my perspective, however, it seems most American believers no longer feel comfortable lying down in green pastures for very long. They're easily bored sitting beside still waters. They've forgotten the connection between stillness and the restoration of the soul.
They need to be doing something, and not just going for a drive. What's the point of the drive if there's nowhere to go?
During a time of crisis, like 2020, our greatest compulsion is to be doing something about the problem. And in the 21st century, that usually means forming opinions and building verbal walls between those of us who are right and those others who are wrong.
Social media has turned out to be really bad at social distancing. If we had been content to embrace the stillness of the streets, we might have avoided rushing like panicked wildebeests onto the information highway.
Inexplicably, science became the ball in a game of political ping pong being played out online. Christians questioned each others' spirituality over disagreements on physical vs. virtual church, masks or no masks, and how it all impacted on politics.
Had we all chosen God's stillness, we might have been able to be still and know not only God, but to grasp His priorities in the midst of the furious pursuit of rightness.
When you find yourself fretting about the wrongness of others' opinions and envious of their followers, simply stop.
Be still before the LordPsalm 37:7
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