I got no words!

I went to bed completely discouraged Monday night cuz I just had no words for a Tuesday Devo. I sat down one last time to come up with something before I went to bed and I had nothing. I flipped over to Facebook and saw an Urgent Prayer Request for a dad at our school with COVID. I added him to the prayer list went to bed praying and feeling defeated. Then came Tuesday and the first thing I read was a blog about Becoming Small in the Lives of Adult Children. by Ever Thine Home. Her point was, if we are so large in our adults kids lives why do they need a Savior? Sometimes we aren’t supposed to have any words. Sometimes we need to just shut up and give it to God. I’m not good at knowing when to shut up. Their is a constant need to fill the space with noise I woke up with two thoughts:

1I have a friend who has several teenagers that are really struggling with some hard issues. She told me that she has made a physical Jesus Jar and when she gets the crisis call or text from one of them, she writes it on a sticky note and gives it straight to Jesus. I need a Jesus Jar, I’m making one today!!!

2My journey to quiet has been a difficult one. I’ve lived many years with people who like noise. The boys have some noise on ALL the time. They listen to podcasts, they listen to books, they have the TV on for background noise at home and the radio on in the car all the time. Then one of them died, then one of them moved out, then another and it was QUIET. I thought I needed to hate the quiet. I thought I needed to fill the quiet. But I discovered I like the quiet. It didn’t come natural. I had to learn to be comfortable with my own thoughts. I started looking at memes about “shutting up” but that got dark real fast Then I thought less is more and finally realized the concept I was trying to convey is … be still! Jesus doesn’t tell us to SHUT UP because darkness isn’t in him, he tells us to “be still” and in being still we know. And that takes intentionality if we’re just still we tend to drift. I can’t just stop or just shut up or even just be still. I have to listen, study, read intentionally choose my words wisely and speak with wisdom.

“People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, 
people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. 
We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; 
we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; 
we drift toward superstition and call it faith. 
We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; 
we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; 
we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.” 
D.A. Carson

The thing about it is… it’s in trying to fill the space that I mess it up. The world tells us to shut up, no one cares, less is more, quality over quantity. But Psalms tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” The PSV version would read, “Shut up, get out of the way, why do you think you can fix it all.” But my version is warped, it gives me responsibility for all that goes wrong and credit for what goes right and I don’t deserve either. I’m learning quiet is okay, I really do need to be still and let God be God and use me where he sees fit. I got no words, and that’s a good thing if the quiet is leading me closer to him who gives me the words I need when I need them! I pray these words encourage you in some way today.