This week I’m reaching way back (it feels like a decade ago) to the beginning of 2022 when I sent this newsletter out on Mailerlite.
I continue to be in the midst of Staying and look forward to updating you as to what rest has been looking like for me these past 2 weeks. Sometimes you just need a little more time to process and pass over to the other side before you share.
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Have you ever picked a "word of the year"--a word that captures your hopes for the New Year and helps you focus on your chosen priorities?
Last year, I was introduced to the practice and was drawn to the idea of focusing on a theme, rather than a bunch of resolutions that would fizzle out by February.
The only problem was that I couldn’t find a word that didn’t feel worn out.
Then, on January 3, Word Genius emailed me this "word of the day": Echt. There was a photo of a pine tree identical to all of the trees surrounding it, except that is was bright yellow instead of dark green. I clicked and read the following:
Echt: Authentic and typical.
Elsewhere I found that it also means real, genuine, and authentic.
I wrote that word on a notecard and put it up on the wall in our kitchen. That unfamiliar word articulated my desire to know myself and be myself--to let my doing come from being.
To be at rest in my own soul, comfortable in my own skin, living the life God gifted me to live.
New Year´s resolutions have their place. New anything gives us a chance to start again with intentionality. And who doesn’t like the idea of a clean slate?
But those resolutions aren’t ends in and of themselves.
I spent at least a decade of my life sidelined in exhaustion with the taste of disillusionment bitter in my mouth, hung over by the sugar rush of external motivation—that quick energy that fuels a record breaking sprint away from the starting line, feeding visions of transformational change, only to peter out before the finish line of that idealistic expectation.
The good news is that all our goal setting, striving, efforts, and fatigue bring us closer to knowing ourselves and what it is we really need, what we really want.
It brings us closer to the honesty King David referred to in his song/prayer of repentance (from adultery, deception,and murder) and opens our internal space to receive the Holy Spirit.
“… You desire truth in the innermost being, And in secret You will make wisdom known to me.” (Psalm 51:6 NASB 2020)
Which brings me to my word for this year.
I had considered continuing with the word echt , but then I started reading Tyler Staton´s book, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools.
Tyler is a pastor who wrote this book as:“an open invitation to get off the comfortable fence of ultimate uncertainty and find out if God really is knowable or not."
It's "an invitation to be found by God in the place he’s most faithfully been found throughout history: not in a megachurch with Broadway lights and fog machines, or in the eloquent podcast of a contrarian thinker, but in the bare silence of you and the endless expanse beyond you.”
Tyler asks the questions: "Is there an infinitely loving, altogether good Author behind this grand story or not?" And, "If there is, what are the chances he's gently trying to catch my attention?”
Instead of answering those questions, Tyler challenges us by saying that "the answers to those questions can only be discovered" and explains that his book is "an invitation to discovery through prayer."
"Prayer starts with presence" (p. 27) and, for that reason, the foundational chapter for the book is connected to stillness, based on Psalms 46:10:
"Be still and know that I am God."
What does stillness mean to you? Is it a feeling? A practice?
Stillness to me means exhaling, releasing tension from my muscles, and then repeating that verse, telling God that he is God, that I believe in him, and that I´m listening. This works best for me in the context of nature.
I pretty much pray without ceasing, talking to God as I go through the day. I pray on behalf of loved ones three times a day. I meditate on words from the Bible when I wake up and when I go to sleep.
But stillness... it´s hard.
Listening is hard enough when you are looking at someone and you can audibly hear their words.
How do you listen to God? You know, like the people in the Bible who heard God and obeyed?
So, when I read what Tyler said about the purpose of stillness, it changed everything (hyperbole, I know, but that´s how it´s been impacting me):
"Many confuse stillness wtih waiting for revelation. Sometimes revelation does come... But that´s not the purpose of stillness. The purpose is consent." (p. 50)
The purpose of stillness consent.
And that is my word.
My word isn´t prayer, or discovery, or stillness.
My word of the year is:
CONSENT
Tyler goes on to say that consent is "the daily practice of consenting to the work of God’s Spirit, which is deeper than understanding or words.
The word consent captures my mind and heart.
It eclipses the struggle to stay focued on being still through batting away distracting thoughts because it directs my focus to God. I can rest because I´m consenting to him, his presence, his love, his work in my life.
It takes the pressure off.
For me, the word consent assumes relationship and suggests the possibility of mutual intimacy. Consent is something that I, as an autonomous human being, can choose.
It feels safe and free.
And I am not only consenting to what God is doing right now in me--I am freed up to notice what God is doing around me.
Instead of feeling like I need to be this or that or the other, I can simply notice what God is doing and show up as myself.
I can consent by participating according to the gifts, talents, interests, etc. that God gave me when he created me.
Freedom. Release. Rest.
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May your rest be sweet.
Alicia