A Calm and Quiet Soul
Summer for our family is full. Full of playgrounds and pools, days at the beach and barbeques with friends, camping trips and evening walks to get ice cream, bubble machines and squirt gun fights. It is my absolutely favorite time of year, but with four children it can also be a time of constant activity and noise. Perhaps that is why Psalm 131 stood out the most to me from this week’s reading, particularly when the psalmist wrote in verse 2 “…I have calmed and quieted my soul...”. It was as if in the midst of all this summertime activity, someone hit the pause button, and I felt a deep yearning within my soul. If you too find your soul longing for calm and quiet, take a journey with me through Psalm 131 to see what this could mean for you.
A calm and quiet soul begins with humility. The psalmist writes in verse 1, “my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high.” To quiet our souls before the Lord, we must first approach him with humility, like children, recognizing our own weaknesses and dependency on Him, for our need of His grace and mercy.
A calm and quiet soul has let go of the cares and worries of this world. When hungry, a nursing baby is troubled and anxious. His entire focus is on his own needs, and he makes his hunger known with loud cries until it is met. But the psalmist calls us to quiet our souls “like a weaned child with its mother” (verse 2), a child who is now content to simply lie in his mother’s arms because of the comfort and joy her presence brings. We, too, in approaching the Lord, can give him the anxiousness of our souls and learn contentment by simply being in His presence.
A calm and quiet soul leads to hope in the Lord. The psalmist concludes his psalm by encouraging Israel to “hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore” (verse 3). When we see the Lord for who He truly is we can pour contempt on all our pride and trust Him in the urgency of our personal cares and worries. We are reminded of all that he has done for us and we can, in turn, have hope and trust in Him for the future.
Our Sunday services begin with a call to worship from our great and marvelous Lord. May that call this week quiet and calm our souls in the midst of our constant activity and noise, and may we once again together declare our hope is in Him.
Photo by Umberto Gorni on Unsplash