"Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)

According to my dictionary, "advent" means "1. the coming or arrival, especially of something extremely important. 2. The period beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas, observed by many Christians as a season of prayer, fasting, and penitence in preparation for Christmas."

At this point, Advent is fast flying away. It gets harder to practice Advent as we get closer to the big day of Christmas, with all the last-minute preparations for gifts or guests or travel or cooking. Even so, I hope you can carve out some time and finding a contemplative space for stillness, so that God can use your prayer and devotional reading to remind you of your need for God's grace and forgiveness. That stillness prepares you for Christmas, the celebration of God entering into our human flesh with that grace and forgiveness. That stillness also trains you to be alert for the multiple ways that God does come into your life every day.

"For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from God comes my salvation." (Psalm 62:1)

There is an aspect of stillness more important than carving out time and spending time in a space that encourages contemplation. Interior stillness is the hardest to experience. Assuming that you're just like me: It is so hard to quiet our minds! We are so full of anxieties that distract us from God's presence!

I have experienced that anew, as I have been practicing Advent during this period of enforced idleness. What is my agenda for each day of my convalescence? All I need to do is to eat and take medication at the proper times, to bathe and dress, to take a walk or two each day, and to rest. Doesn't sound like much, does it? I do a lot of sitting. But it is so hard for me to abandon an accomplishment mindset -- and so I do not have much interior stillness! I worry whether I'm getting dressed too late in the morning, compared to yesterday. I'm reading a lot, but in the back of my mind is the next book waiting in line, wondering when I'll get to it. And I try to measure my physical recovery: how hard to push myself on my walks and how many times to use my breathing machine, wondering when I'll be able to entirely wean myself from the oxygen. And on and on. Not much stillness.

But healing comes according to whose schedule? God's. These weeks of enforced inactivity are a golden opportunity for me to simply be open to God's advent into my life -- if I can only be quiet and still.

I remember that that's true! And so I sit, in a place in the house that encourages contemplation, with a single verse of a single Psalm. "Be still and know that I am God." I allow that to be God's prayer in me and for me, for how long? Thirty minutes? An hour? And, for a while, stillness comes.