Breathing

It’s all gone quiet.  Eerily quiet.  An empty office?  No, as many people rustling about as usual.  Subdued conversation?  Maybe, but it feels like more than just an auditory phenomenon.  It’s really quiet.  It’s really still.  What is that calm, like a glass-topped loch?  What is that quiet confidence?  Do I think “my side” will win?  No.  Not exactly.  I have realised in the past few months that there are no sides.  None that matter, anyway.  Is it that I think the result will be the “right one”, then?  No.  In one sense, I don’t think either result is the “right” one.  And at the same time whatever the result is will be by definition the right one.

So what is that I feel?

Thinking about it just now, I think it is God.  By a trick of the law, forcibly preventing me from saturating myself in constant BBC updates.  By a trick of the date, making me realise that all things pass.  By a trick of theology, firmly reminding me that God is immutably sovereign over all things.

I think it is peace.  Knowing he is utterly and eternally in control.  Peace that transcends understanding, because circumstances never provide cause for it.  Everything will change.  It always has, it always will.  But He remains the same.

I think it is hope.  Knowing that though our pride may hollow us out and our self-importance blind us to our flaws, there lies across the scarred face of humanity the detectable image of God.  Knowing that neither sinking boats nor sinking feet tell the whole story.  Knowing that in all things, He is working.

I think it is His presence.  That I so constantly need, yet so reticently seek.  Like an amateur diver so distracted by his surroundings that he forgets to breathe.

How grateful I am that He is so patient, so gracious, as to seek me out when I have failed to seek Him.

 

In/out, yes/no, Scottish/British or any mixture of the two, whatever I am, and whatever we as a people become... we need to breathe.