Another Blog on Stillness

God continues to surprise us with His incomprehensible love, the love we try to fit in a box and make sense of. He individually pursues us in various forms that often astounds us, sometimes with people and sometimes by putting us back in the places we thought we would never go again. Betsy Floyd was a Beyond participant in 2010. She decided to come back this summer to serve on base camp staff as assistant cook. Little did she know God's pursuit did not stop just at base camp but extended to the mountains as well. 

At a recent bible study in basecamp, we were asked to draw a picture that depicts our relationship with God. In the one minute I was given for the task, a megaphone sounding off into a slightly “Dumboesque” ear was pried from my subconscious. My explanation was that God was the ear and I was the megaphone: loud and jarring, sending crazed, aperiodic sound waves into space, hoping an ear was out there listening, no sense of peace or stillness to be found. A few weeks before this drawing, I was summoned to join a trip up JJ. At the end of the second day of hiking we dragged our sorry selves to our campsite: the illustrious Sun City. Enclosed in the arms of the surrounding mountains was a large granite area splitting an aquamarine glacier pool in two. The sun was merely a willing aid, illuminating the gradient hues of the pools and its reflection of the peaks. This is one of those sights where I wondered how few people in this world get to see something as raw and beautiful as Sun City. Shortly after arriving, I laid down for a nap, letting the sun warm my chapped face. Obliterated from the hiking, the usual barrage of my thoughts was absent. No pleading or demanding, no thanking, nothing. The sun’s rays filtered gold through my eyelids as my body slowly relaxed and melted into the rock. I began to feel that strange and tangible peace that comes only from the submission to stillness. I perceive this state as a sacred realm, intimate and of God. In this realm, God’s message is clear and convicting. 

Sun City

In my day-to-day life, I find that what I say and what is understood by others are often two different things. Not a rare phenomenon by any means, but daily experiences of not being heard slowly feed into a sense of desperation to feel understood. This is why I talk at God so often. The beauty of being still is that it often leads to a position of listening for God. As one listens, the desperation begins to slip away. Sitting in stillness on that rock at Sun City reminded me that only God can truly understand and respond to me in the uniquely meaningful way my heart desires. But first I need to stop talking and be still. It is in this place, I will be open to that which I have been longing to hear. 

Betsy Floyd