From the Archives: Be Still and Move

There is the occasion when the Lord brings to mind some of my own writings from the past, things I need to be reminded of, truths I need to hear again. Moments of sanctification in the Christian life are rarely one-and-done. It’s more like multiple-times-over-and-never-done. God isn’t afraid to keep bringing us back to the same places time and again so that we can be shaped into the likeness of Christ.

Tonight he reminded of a moment I had almost nine years ago and then the corresponding post I wrote. I had moved into my first apartment in August of 2014. I had a pretty significant mental health crisis in September 2017, and I moved out of that apartment to move back home to live with my parents for a time. It is lightly edited for time references.

Perhaps there are others out there who need this reminder—not just me.

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I remember when I first moved into my teeny-tiny apartment.  My dad thought I was moving into a glorified walk-in closet, and my mom was concerned about whether I was going to crazy in such a small place.

I, on the other hand, loved my little corner of the world, all 350 rambling square feet of it.  I used to dream of living in a lavish house when I grew up, but then I traveled around the world a few times and discovered that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot I needed in order to live.  Some books, some clothes, my bed, a small kitchen, a functional bathroom, and enough elbow room to turn around in a small circle and I'm good to go.  And that is pretty much exactly what I got when I moved into my studio apartment in 2014.

I had no internet, no cable, no microwave, and I unashamedly loved it that way. I didn't bother using drinking glasses because I always just drank straight out of whatever carton or container the drink came in. I never closed the bathroom door. I had a 23" TV, which my parents gave to me for my 30th birthday, along with a magnifying glass, because my dad had no idea how I was going to see anything on such a small screen. When you're used to 60" screens, yes, 23" does seem a touch under-sized. I had a dorm-sized refrigerator with a freezer the size of a glove compartment, so I learned to eat a lot healthier and better because, quite simply, frozen meals were not an option when your freezer was generally pretty worthless. There were exactly five (six, if you count the bed, which didn't technically belong to me) pieces of furniture to my name in that space - three bookshelves, one recliner, and a desk.  I lived exactly 0.6 miles from work, 0.2 miles from the local library, 0.4 miles from my gym, 0.8 miles from my favorite park, and 1.7 miles from my favorite pie joint - Just Pies.  I had two windows, which was one more window than pretty much everyone else in the building.  I specifically held out for a corner apartment and paid extra for it, just so I could have that additional window.  I wanted as much light as possible.

I had a string of crazy neighbors that nearly did me in.  The last one was not only a fan of playing his guitar at all hours, but he never quite understood the purpose of a garbage disposal.  Dude, it's for grinding up your scraps, not your entire refrigerator.  I lost track of the number of times my kitchen sink and bathtub backed up with all sorts of crud and black sludge all because this guy couldn't seem to get a clue.

Despite the paper thin door and the neighbors I prayed God would somehow cause to move elsewhere, I loved that space.  I loved that neighborhood.  I loved living near the library.  I loved walking to the park in the summer.  I loved having a small space to call all my own.  I loved walking to the farmer's market.  I loved being able to drive home over my lunch breaks and take cat naps.  

I lived a lot of life in that apartment.  I experienced one of the hardest seasons of my life in that apartment.  I cried a lot in that apartment.  I wrote a lot in that apartment.

I encountered Jesus in that apartment.

And then—then it was all over.

I was learning that God quite literally uproots us from our places of comfort to see to it that we don't miss what he has planned next for us.  I think I would have stayed in that apartment for years without questioning it.  I would have stayed because it was comfortable, and it was convenient, and it was easy.  Sometimes he uproots us in order to see to it that we don't miss the promised land.  It's what he said to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, "Go...to the land I will show you."  Sometimes we have to leave the places we love to go to places not yet named.  In the wake of the upheaval that was happening at the time, I just kept sensing God say to me, "Move."  And then after awhile it became, "MOVE."  I didn't understand it at the time. I didn't understand this command to quite literally move out of the physical space I was living in, a space that I loved, but was now a place of deep anxiety for me. I started to have a very physical response to my apartment when I would go there. I started staying with my parents because I couldn't handle being alone at night, but even when I would stop by my apartment to pick up some things or grab clothes for the gym, I would walk into it and suddenly feel desperate to get out of there. It was such a mystery to me.  

When the Israelites of the Old Testament were escaping from their centuries of slavery in Egypt, marching out boldly, they were heading out to a land they had not yet named, this was place that was unknown and uncertain. And it didn't take long for the fears to settle in.

The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, so that he pursued the Israelites, who were marching out boldly.  The Egyptians—all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, horsemen and troops—pursued the Israelites and overtook them as they camped by the sea near Pi Hahiroth, opposite Baal Zephon. 

As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?  Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” 

Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again.  The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” 

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on (Exodus 14:8-15).

One of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith is that we must simultaneously be still and move.  It is not an either/or state of being, but rather a both/and.  It's also not a matter of sequence, that we are first still and then we move, or vice versa.

The Word of God commands us to be still.  Psalm 46 leaves no doubt about that.  "Be still, and know that I am God," he commands in verse 10.  Be still.  Set your heart at rest and be still.  Sink down, relax, tell your heart to let go, and be still.  Psalm 37:7 says, "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him."  Silence the noise, and put a damper on all the racket in your head, and be still.  

It's what Moses commands the people to do.  "Do not be afraid," he declares, "The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still."  

And as Moses declares over the people, "Be still," God follows shortly thereafter with "Move."  

That's the part we like to leave out.  

Stop crying out to me and move.

As much as the Word of God commands us to be still, it also unequivocally tells us to move. Forward motion counts in the kingdom of God just as much as being still does. Paul exhorts us in Philippians 3:13-14: "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."  To the paralytic, Jesus said, "Take up your mat and walk."  To the adulteress, he said, "Leave your life of sin."  To the cripple, he said, "Stretch out your hand."  To Lazarus, he said, "Come forth!"  To the servants at the wedding, he said, "Fill the jars."  Jesus, more often than not, was always telling people to move.  

If we are to commit our lives to Jesus, and to have any hope of following in his footsteps, then we must figure out what it looks to simultaneously be still and move.  We must figure out what it means to set our hearts at rest, to know he is God, and trust he is in complete and loving control.  We must set aside our desire for control and certainty and rational explanations as to why God ordains what he does for our lives.  But we must also figure out how to keep pressing on, to quit our complaining and whining, to get our eyes off the end of our own noses, and move.  In my case, that literally meant packing up my bags and moving all of my possessions, even if I didn't understand. Your version of move may look different.  But whatever our relative circumstances, we must simultaneously move, while still setting our hearts at rest.  

I stood in the door frame of my apartment that morning, my hand resting on the door knob, the door cracked halfway. I stole one last glance, noticing the sunlight filling up a space that was now empty, blank, and echo-y, with nothing in it to absorb the noise. I quietly closed the door, slipped the key into the lock one last time, twisted it, felt the bolt click into place.

Then I turned and walked away.

Be still and move.

The Stories of Undramatic Seasons

I started a note of possible blog topics on my phone when I was diagnosed in February 2024: ideas, titles, single sentences, paragraphs—each a little seed waiting to be planted. I added to it every day; there was so much going on in my head that the note eventually grew long enough to require several swipes to reach the bottom. Those topics burned within me once, and yet never made it beyond that note.

Those topics no longer burn within me, so the list of ideas has languished for nearly two years. The note isn’t even on my phone anymore—I moved it off the cloud and onto to my laptop. I haven’t added to it in quite some time. It still surfaces in my thoughts, though. I often debate forcing myself to resurrect it and pick an item to write about, but that kind of writing never yields anything good for me. A chore merely to be done.

My most prolific writing times are when I’m off on traveling adventures or in a profound spiritual crisis. On the desktop version of the blog you can view the archives in the left column, a year-by-year count of my posts. My wordiest years were 2010–2012 (150 posts cumulatively) and then 2024-2025 (75 posts cumulatively). On the other end of the spectrum, however, in other multi-year stretches, I was lucky if I posted in the low double-digits. Some individual years, I didn’t even make it out the single digits. Between 2010 and 2012, I was went to Kenya twice—those trips released a steady flow of stories and reflections. And most of you know how 2024-25 went: writing these last two years has been like breathing—an unparalleled volume of words rose from wells deep within; I was in a writing zone all of its own.

Now it’s 2026, and that well of words seems to have run dry, which is why it has maybe seemed like crickets around here. No crisis. No traveling. Just the steady state of living. That’s not to say there isn’t anything happening in my life. There’s the return of the buzzards. (My free morning entertainment has finally migrated back.)  There’s the shenanigans of a dumb baby groundhog that strayed into my garage—just last night!—that I spent far too long trying to capture and return him back to the wild. (He eventually made his way out after some exhaustion on both sides.) There’s wedding cookie table “university". (Who knew, right?) I am back to driving again after my last seizure in March. (My days as an adult teenager are now over.) And, of course, there’s always my health. (Hello, perimenopause! By all means, yes, please pull up a seat at the table. So not glad you are here.) 

But words? They have been hard to come by, as has motivation at large. Anything that even remotely hits the slightest tremor on the writing Richter scale feels ordinary and uninspired, dictated by an unspoken threshold in my mind for what is worthy and unworthy to write about. I haven’t even been writing in my own personal journals, let alone for a public audience.

I don’t know that I have ever pre-ordered a book before in my life, but if there are things registering on Tish Harrison Warren’s writing Richter scale, I’m reading it. She released her new book What Grows In Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience earlier this week. I pre-ordered it back in January. I honestly forgot I did, so when it arrived this week, current me thanked past me for the surprise. (Let me tell ya, it’s a real walk in the park when you hit midlife and brain cancer all at the same time.) The prologue and the first chapter alone were worth the buy because she might as well have taken the words right out of my own brain. 

There was one particular snippet that immediately jumped off the page for me, the nudge to finally sit down and write this very post. She writes about how she had been in a season of extreme weariness, running on fumes. She shared about how she had gotten into a fight with her husband and daughter and stormed out of the house. She went for a drive and at one point just cried out into the void at God, “I don’t know what to do!” She then drove home, put her kids to bed, made amends with her daughter and husband, and went to sleep. What struck me was her next line: "And in our moment in history, such an ending to this small story does not seem brave or profound or worthwhile. Because of this, we end up not telling the stories of these weary yet undramatic seasons—unless those stories end in a total dismantling and reinvention of our lives.”

Who wants to hear about the day in and day out realities of laundry, working the same job for thirteen years, spending a Friday night, single, home alone, catching a groundhog stuck in your garage, and paying bills? Monotony is just that—monotonous. The same is true in the spiritual landscape. Praying for that one particular person for thirteen years? Reading the same verses for your whole life and still not able to fully recall them? Going to church every Sunday, only to find you’re still struggling with some of the same sins and vices? Bor-ing. Who wants to sit down and watch those scenes? 

Eugene Peterson says it well in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction:

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by the tourist mindset. Religion is understood as a visit to an attractive site to be made when we have adequate leisure.

A long obedience in the same direction means there are stories we don’t tell because quiet, day-to-day living and faithfulness isn’t glamorous. I have been captured by a tourist mindset of my own life, believing my life and my writing were valuable because they were sensational in their own right, worth tuning in for, which is disturbingly and embarrassingly self-absorbed.

Day-to-day faithfulness isn’t glamorous. And yet that day-to-day is where we spend our lives. It’s the liminal space between the high highs and low lows of life that we tread the most—and that space between is where we acquire that thing called holiness. It’s often quiet and unnoticed, unhurried, a “patient acquisition,” and a “long apprenticeship,” as Peterson said.

Perhaps the ordinary act of watching buzzards each morning—finding God’s care even in ugly birds—is as valuable as the extraordinary act of listening to a neuro‑oncologist tell me I have rare brain cancer—and still believe in God’s care for me in an ugly diagnosis. Both shape my long obedience toward God and holiness; both contribute to spiritual growth if I have eyes to see them.

We each have our stories of undramatic seasons, but may they each be part of a much larger story being told of not only our patient acquisition of holiness, but also of the God who is sovereign over that patient acquisition—and is willing to wait for us.