It was late fall and I was on yet another Appalachia Service Project trip with our group from Briarcliff UMC. We had worked hard all day and returned to the center stiff and bone tired. We were the first of our two teams back that day and hurried to get showers and change into clean clothes so the showers would be free when the others returned. We gathered on the long front porch in rocking chairs waiting for our friends and for dinner. The center leader’s yellow lab, Pax lay beside us. We all sat there for 20 to 30 minutes with no one saying a word – just complete silence and peace. Painted on the porch beam overhead were these words. “Be still and know.”
Thomas Merton wrote, “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity . . . We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” That day we discovered this unity, with one another as we served a family in need and with God without whom we would have never been able to complete the work that needed to be done on that home. We rarely achieve moments like that while in our comfort zones. But when we are willing to step out in faith to accomplish something for the kingdom, God rewards us with unexpected blessings.
Heavenly God, thank you for giving us glimpses of the greater kingdom. Help us in the middle of our busy days to stop; to be still and know. In Christ’s name we humbly pray. Amen.
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