Yielding

"So it seems the most important starting point for prayer is yielding: laying down our defenses, taking off masks, recognizing that God has already called us and is already waiting for us to come to him. Yielding is putting aside our self-importance, our cares and schedules and undertakings, in order, very simply, to be with God. It is the yielding up of everything that keeps us from the Lord, letting go of anxiety and restlessness. It is the gift to him of time, the only coin we have to spend: the gift of ourselves, one we find all too difficult to give." (Emilie Griffin, Clinging)

I keep going back to this paragraph in Griffin's little book. How many times I think "I don't have time" to just rest in the stillness and wait upon God. How many times I use the excuse of busyness, or don't really even try to make excuses. And how often, I wonder, is it because it can just be so hard to quiet my soul, to rest, to wait, to listen, to yield? Because it goes against the grain of so much of the rest of the tenor of my rushed and crammed-with-thinking kind of day. Because I might be afraid of what I hear?

Remember Michael Card's song "In Stillness and Simplicity": Is the reason we're not still, to hear you speak, because we don't believe you will? and then In stillness and simplicity, I lose myself in finding thee...

All of this weaving together with this line I read recently from Evelyn Underhill:

"Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day and do not be scrupulous and think it selfish to make a decided struggle for this. You are obeying God's call and giving Him the opportunity to teach you what He wants you to know, and so make you more useful to Him and to other souls.” (Evelyn Underhill’s letters, p. 141)

I will keep trying, even if for only a few minutes a day (and often late at night, when I seem to need it most and can move most easily into it) to put myself in a place of resting and listening.