What If Being Still Is Our Most Productive Self

The blazing fire crackles while soothing acoustic music floods our home. I take a sip of steaming ginger tea and breathe deeply. 

It has been a while since I enjoyed a moment of solitude and the peace it brings. I’ve come to embrace the opportunity to sit with my thoughts at the feet of Jesus. 

Not too long ago, when time offered up a margin, I would immediately squeeze in one more load of laundry, unload the dishwasher, and answer a few more emails. You get the idea. Redeem the time, right?

But God used the storms from the past three years to teach me something about the value of “being still,” a term pulled straight out of scripture but never found its way to my heart. 

The phrase “be still” always made me feel lazy and unproductive. After all, isn’t stillness for the sage, wise theologians who lock themselves in rooms filled with candles, books, and journals? 

However, “being still” is not a suggestion from God but rather a command. It is less about what God needs from us but a practice that trains our hearts to cease striving and rest in Him. 

I recall coming home from the hospital after COVID-19, tethered to oxygen, shuffling down the hallway only to collapse into bed, completely spent. One day, with sloth-like precision, I sauntered further down the hallway into my office. 

Sitting at my desk, looking at the piles of unfinished writing projects, I remember thinking, “God, did you call me to write? If so, your timing doesn’t match my capacity to follow through.” 

I wept. 

Then the Lord reminded me of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 recorded in Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17, John 6:1-15.

Jesus and the disciples had been traveling the countryside, teaching, preaching, performing miraculous healings, and setting people free. Word was spreading. Crowds were gathering. 

On one particular day, Jesus and the disciples, seeking some time away from the crowds, pulled up to shore to be greeted by a large group, at least 5,000, gathered to meet this man of miracles. So Jesus taught. 

At some point, there was a realization that the crowd was hungry. How do you feed a group of this size? Unlike the events I have helped organize that took months of preparation and careful planning to orchestrate a dinner of this magnitude, Jesus had no time to prepare a feast for this hungry mob. There was no local catering business to assist, only a child’s lunch consisting of five loaves of bread and two fish. 

And in surrender from that child and obedience from the disciples who followed Jesus’ lead, God provided more than enough to send them home with full bellies.

As I sat in my office, tears trickling down my face, God whispered, “Ev, I can do more with your surrender than you can accomplish in all your striving. Give me your loaves and fish, and trust me to exceed what you can imagine.” 

I did. I gave God all my wants, wishes, expectations, and writing dreams. 

And since that moment, God has been faithful to His promise. He took my loaves and fish that day and continued multiplying them in ways I could never do in my strength. 

So now, when given a choice to strive and get more done or seize a “be still” moment with the Savior, I choose the latter. I am discovering that “being still” is not the least I can do. It is the best I can give. In the margin of stillness, I am learning to abide and trust that my Father doesn’t need me to do more. He wants me to trust that He is working all things for my good if I will but surrender all to Him. 

What about you? Have you embraced a false narrative about what it means to be still? Are you feeling spent from all the doing? Are you striving and finding that your joy is fading? 

Then it is time to hand over your loaves and fishes to the One who can multiply in your surrender more than you can do in all the striving.