I was listening to a great interview of James Taylor, who was reminiscing about his childhood in the Carolinas. He remembered the woods where he spent time with the trees and there he could have "long thoughts" with himself. How little our thoughts are "long" any more. We exist with sound bites, trailers, ditties, the shunted language of the digital world.
I am thinking about the places I have been able to have long thoughts with myself: in a cabin in the woods, on a wooded hill, on a bus trip in Scotland, on a jet ski on a lake in the Tehachapi Mountains, laying in the grass below El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. The visual memory is vivid. The message just as clear in each.
I even remember being stuck inside my house in a snowstorm, in a cast for a broken ankle, my kids out-of-state. No way to go anywhere. Even there, God had a word for me. "Be still and know that I am God," he says.
There is never enough space for God. He can fill me and, more expandedly, have me fill the space he creates. Will I ever be still enough to hear it all?
Do less, so you can be more.
