I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Ps 131:2)
Lord, still my soul, and let me focus on Christ.
Mazda’s slogan captures well 21st century western culture: zoom, zoom. Mazda uses the slogan to market its cars, but the marketing works because it strikes at a value within western culture. We are a high tech, fast paced, information-bombarded people. We are here and there and hardly have time to breathe before we are back here again. We are a sensual people, perhaps more so than any other time in history. The pursuit of earthly pleasure is our specialty. We have at our fingertips more entertainment, information, convenience, and speed than any other period of history. We have everything the world could want … except contentment.
We are too busy for God. We have so much, but we don’t seem to have time. God says, “Be still and know that I am God.” David said that he stilled and quieted his soul. It was the custom of Jesus to be alone with God and pray. He spent 40 days in the desert with God, Moses 40 days on the mount, Daniel three weeks in prayer. All of this is foreign to us. We struggle to get twenty minutes in the morning. We are afraid to be still. Sometimes we cannot go more than a half hour without looking at our phone or turning on the news or the radio. Our culture has trained us to have stimulus, but constant stimulus diverts our attention from God. We are like a teenager who cannot hear her father because the music is so loud or because she is texting on her phone. We are like a husband who doesn’t know his wife because, well, he doesn’t have time for her. He has other things to do. One day God will say to us, “You had other things to do.”
We are proud of our technology, our knowledge, our pace, our ways. People often talk about how busy they are in a way that suggests that they are doing something important because they are busy. But sometimes all of our “important” busyness merely prevents us from the real importance of knowing God. We don’t know Him … partly because we are too busy. We have the equipment for knowing much more of God than we do but choose instead to listen to earth. We often cannot hear God through the babble of life. God will not shout; and if we refuse to turn down the noise, we will never hear Him. This is a great problem in our ability to know God.
