I Cannot Sit Still Long Enough To Make Anything

Ten minutes. Maybe twelve on a good day.

You sit down with something. It is going fine. And then there is a movement in you, low and physical, and before it has become a thought you are standing, and by the time you notice, you are in the kitchen looking at nothing in particular.

You call it restlessness. Everybody who knows you calls it that. He cannot sit still, they say, and they say it with affection, and it has been said about you since you were about nine.

I want to look underneath it, because I do not think restlessness is the whole story, and I think you have suspected that for a while.

Watch what the getting up actually does.

It does not take you to something fun. It does not take you to the water or to a friend or to the thing you have been meaning to enjoy. It takes you to a task. There is always a task. A thing to be moved, a call to make, something to check, and the moment you find one, the discomfort goes.

That is not restlessness. Restlessness would take you anywhere. This takes you somewhere specific, every single time, and what it takes you to is a defensible activity.

You are not a man who cannot sit still. You are a man for whom sitting still with no purpose is uncomfortable, and who has been solving that discomfort with tasks for about forty years, and calling the solution a personality.

Be still, and know

There is a line everybody has seen on a wall, and almost nobody reads the setting it comes out of, and the setting changes it completely.

The psalm around it is loud. Nations raging, kingdoms moved, the earth melting, wars being made to cease. It is not a quiet psalm about a quiet afternoon. It is a psalm about upheaval, and in the middle of the upheaval, the voice says this.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

Be still. Said into noise, not into calm.

And the reason given is not that stillness is good for a person. The reason given is God's own position: know that I am God. The stillness is not a technique for anything. It is what a person does when somebody else is holding the situation.

You are commanded into stillness rather than invited to try it, and Psalm 46:10 gives it in the middle of noise rather than after the noise has settled. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instruction spoken over raging nations and lays it on a man who cannot stay in a chair for twelve minutes.

And notice what stillness is contrasted with in that psalm. Not laziness. Striving. The whole surrounding picture is of people and nations working hard at holding things together.

You have a stillness that stands opposite striving rather than opposite usefulness, and it is already settled in the written word that the still one is not the idle one. His Spirit is the one who says be still to a man whose hands have been solving a feeling for forty years.

The tasks are not the point

Now here is the part that needs care, because I am not calling your tasks a fault.

The things you get up to do are real. The gate does need oiling. The call does need making. There is a long record of a man being useful in other people's lives, and none of that is being taken off anybody tonight.

But look at the timing. The tasks always arrive at minute eleven. They do not arrive at minute two, in the middle of something. They arrive exactly when the discomfort does, which tells you they are not being chosen. They are being supplied.

And what you make when you do sit is not a measure of you, and neither is the length of time you manage. A man who lasts eleven minutes and a man who lasts an hour are not two grades of person.

You are not being disobedient by staying seated, and heaven has never once asked a man to prove himself by getting up. Psalm 46:10 puts the command on the stillness and the knowing rather than on the doing, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that order where Scripture put it.

And do not turn this into a target either. Do not decide tonight is going to be forty minutes and next week an hour. That is the same engine running the other way.

You have permission to sit for twenty minutes with the pull still on, and this is yours: the stillness was commanded into noise and not into peace. It is written in Psalm 46:10 to be still and know, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible for a man who has never managed it.

Twenty minutes, and do not get up

So here is the ask, and there is one hard edge on it.

Tonight, sit down and make something for twenty minutes. Out on the step, at the table, wherever. Use what is already there. Carve, whittle, work a knot, sketch a bad picture of the horizon.

And do not get up.

At about minute eleven a task will arrive. It will be a genuine task and it will feel urgent and it will be perfectly reasonable. It is not urgent. Nothing that arrives at minute eleven has ever been urgent.

You are commanded into stillness rather than invited to attempt it, and Psalm 46:10 gives that order into raging nations. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a command a place to stand rather than one more thing to manage.

Stay down. Let the pull go through you. It lasts about ninety seconds and then it changes.

What you make will be rough and probably abandoned halfway. That is fine. The making is not really what is being asked for tonight. The staying is.

You are covered while the pull is still on you, and Psalm 46:10 is the ground under that. Be still and know that I am God is written into a scene of nations raging, and the Spirit of God is present on a step at seven in the evening with a man who wants to stand up.