Be Still And Know That I Am God, Psalm 46:10

Dan Doyle

Be still. That suggestion goes against the prevailing philosophies of our times. Be still? Where or what is that going to get me? We always seem to be chasing things: schedules, various pursuits, dreams, and goals of every conceivable kind that we have set for ourselves. When we fulfill many of these pursuits and dreams, we find times that we still feel empty, unfulfilled. Where is the wisdom in all of this? There is an old joke that goes something like this: “Wisdom has been chasing after you for a long time, but so far you have always been faster.” This may be equally true of happiness.

In the Song of Songs, there is a passage about a bride who is constantly seeking after the one “whom my heart loves”. She seeks after her love everywhere, night and day, but never finds him. After this desperate search for her love, day and night, in every direction, the passage ends with these words, “I had hardly left them when I found him whom my heart loves” (Song of Songs 3:1-4). Of course we know that the One whom “her heart loves” is God. It was when she stopped her seeking, when she became still, that she found that the One “whom her heart loves” was already there waiting for her.

This is a good metaphor for us to contemplate as we continue along our own lifelong rough-and-tumble journey toward a deepening relationship with God. All too often we lose our way because in our pursuit of happiness, the happiness we think will be most fulfilling, most satisfying to us, we may be seeking it in the wrong things or lesser things, things that appear to be sources of happiness, but in the end fail us. Rather than happiness, we may experience frustration, disappointment, bitterness, and finally despair.

The writer of the Song of Songs is on to something as true today as it was on the day those words were inspired and written. What is that? It is the fact that the only true love that will ever satisfy our deepest, our most inexpressible desire to be so profoundly known and loved that we will never again feel that emptiness that causes us to constantly run after all those lesser things that have no life in them. God is that love. God is the life that we seek. God is the only source, the only goal, the only power that can fulfill our hearts’ deepest desires.

Mary Magdalene provides us with another great example. She who had been possessed by demons, by all of the meanest, vilest, most depraved desires of the human imagination, encountered God in Jesus, and was completely healed. What she had been before, every depraved thing that she had pursued in her desperate search for happiness, for human relationship, became as nothing to her when she met Jesus. As we know, she became one of his most beloved disciples. In her relationship with Jesus, she had recovered her humanity, her most real self. She had found the only relationship that can fulfill every human heart’s deepest desires, to love and to be loved, unconditionally.

What we seek is life itself, that is life in God, life eternal. The desire for this is universal. It is within all of us. We all bear within us the unrecognized loss of innocence, the loss of Eden, that resulted from the Fall of Adam and Eve. That loss echoes deep within the subconscious mind of every human being, whether it is recognized or not. It is what is behind all of our seeking. It is like a whisper in a dream, calling us to find the way back home. Jesus is that way. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life that never ceases to call us back home. It is he whom we are seeking, even though we are often looking in the wrong place. Be still.

Just as the bride in the Song of Songs and Mary Magdalene discovered, it was when they let go of all that was false, let go of seeking their happiness in things other than the One who is the true Lover of us all, that they found the happiness that their deepest hearts desired. So it is with us. We must learn to stop, to be still, and to know that God is the source and the goal of all that we desire. Be still and know God.