(7/9) Be Still

I left church that day thinking it would be a struggle to give up something I spent every free moment doing but it wasn’t.  Days went by maybe even weeks and I never missed it.  Once when I dared to open the app again I did not enjoy what I saw.  In fact, I was bored by it and so incredibly grateful for that feeling.  God called me out on the blocks I was putting up and helped me step away. I just had to make the decision to do so.  They were merely distractions. If I really wanted to hear Him I was going to have to be comfortable being uncomfortable sometimes.  Masking a bad day with noise in my headphones was not going to improve anything. 

I replaced the time I spent on TikTok with either audiobooks, streamed TV shows, or exploring more of the Hallow app that hosted Bible in a Year.  One of the shows I found myself getting into again was The Chosen.  Watching this show while on a journey to reconnect with my faith was a perfect pairing.  However, it was still noise. I was still putting my headphones in at every free moment. One day, while preparing for naptime, I had just heard a message about being still. The sound machine I normally used when my niece was napping here wasn’t working but I could use my phone. That meant not having my phone with me for the duration of naptime. I recalled the lesson I had heard that morning about eliminating distractions and decided to surrender my phone.  It was incredibly uncomfortable to be “bored” the entire time but it was something of a wake-up call to me. I ended up taking a well-needed nap during that time that otherwise I would have missed out on. Instead of scrolling, shopping, playing, or whatever else I do to avoid household tasks, I simply rested. After reflecting on the day and how I had been led to be still that day I happened to look down at the shirt I randomly threw on that morning and had been wearing all along. It said: Be Still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10