“Imagine for a moment you are alone . . . no books, no Netflix, no one is home with you. The house is quiet, and so are you.
The longer you sit, the more you feel.
The silence is uncomfortable. An argument with your sister rises to the surface, the sarcastic comment your husband/boyfriend/friend made days ago still hurts, the discontent and discouragement you feel in motherhood slices open a shameful hole.
Longings begin to rise and so does guilt. Guilt over not being fully present with your people shames you, the loss of a loved one aches, the guilt for not being further along in your spiritual life stings.
The longer you sit, the more memories begin to rise, taking you back to years ago. The anger of your father makes your chest tighten. The neighborhood boy who teased you stirs up feelings of embarrassment. These complicated memories and uncomfortable feelings make you want to get up, grab your phone, reply to texts, or reach for a wine glass.
But what if, for a moment, you stay?
Imagine the very places you want to fix, avoid, power through, shout Bible verses at, stuff, or run from are actually the very way to wholeness. Imagine, instead of getting up to investigate what is under the couch or neurotically tidy the mail, you let all those feelings rise. You let them come up to the surface to breathe. You open your heart, talk to Jesus, and find love.
Imagine God is inviting you to follow these feelings. Imagine if you could stay with all those unfinished places within your soul and story and let them become your pathway to freedom.
If we’ve walked with Jesus long enough, we may feel a void inside of us. It is an uneasy place. One without words. We accepted Jesus into our hearts to escape the void. But it’s still there. We know it. It is there inside of us. It makes us feel guilty, ashamed, uncertain, and afraid.
When we withdraw, we abandon our very souls because we can’t make sense of our inner chaotic cell. Everything inside of us has become too much. We begin to believe that counseling or Jesus or communion just can’t resolve the ache we feel. We keep showing up to church or Bible study, but we slowly disengage our souls.
When we work harder, we battle on, grit our teeth and bear down. We read more books, follow more Christian women online, listen to more worship music, and silence all uncertainty. We control and contain and constantly lose ourselves in the need to keep up.
When we walk away, we give up on Jesus and the church. Our faith becomes a complex story from our past. Jesus just didn’t work out.
But what if we are in this place, not because we are doing something wrong, but because God is tending to the soil of our inner world? The process is hard because it means experiencing parts of our stories that make us cringe with painful self-awareness. But the most unlovely parts of us are the very places God is redeeming. God is moving closer.
Yes, stay. Stay where you most resist being.
You are exactly where you’re meant to be. Not fighting to get ahead and not giving up on ever overcoming, not closing the door on your faith entirely but there, right where you are. Simply opening. Simply accepting. Simply moving inward.
This is the sacred gift of staying.“
Copyright 2020, Bethany House Publishers. No part of this may be copied or used without permission. If interested, contact Anjuli Paschall.
Stay is a tender call to enter, to open, and to experience the echoing darkness buried beneath piles of mail and laundry and years of pain. This is a call to follow the fears and frustration to the unknown, frightening places inside. This is an invitation to let Jesus pull out a chair at the table of your soul and hear Him say, “Stay, you and your heart sit down.” Stay is about how Anjuli learned to become a little girl again, asking a big God if He could stay with someone small like her.
a promise + a prayer
Be sure to sign up for my new 5-day series called “a promise + a prayer” starting in May. Each day you will receive a note with a daily Bible promise and a simple prayer to help you stay close to God’s heart. Just a little something to help you pull away from all that is pulling on you in this season of uncertainty and overwhelming concern. And it’s free.
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To be still and linger long enough to hear God’s voice speak what my heart needs to know.
To be still and breathe. To empty my head of all the noise.
Stay means perseverance in being present in the present
Thanks for this today Renee.
When I heard the word STAY I first heard ABIDE…which is my word for this year!
I just looked it up after I heard ABIDE – and in the Greek it means TO STAY or TO REMAIN.
I guess I heard Him correctly. 😉
Bless you!
Stay means to fight past the urge to run..
Stay to me means clinging to the Lord no matter what circumstances surround us.
Stay is when you follow Him no matter how much it does or doesn’t make sense to anyone, including yourself. It means seeking His will; it means staying steadfast in His path and continually seeking Him.
He may be calling you across the country, or across the world, or even just calling you to be faithful in your life as a homemaker (or whatever your chosen career).
He may be asking you to step away from your known into the unknown to stretch and grow you; He may be calling away from the life you are living into a new space and life so that someone doesn’t spend eternity in hell.
Or He may be asking one (you/me) to stay on a path that will honor and glorify Him and His purposes and Kingdom.
This past year has been just this lesson for me. I still don’t understand the call to stay in a place that is difficult, or why my life had to be turned upside down, but stay He says, so stay I’m trying (some days are easier than others, for sure).
I guess it depends on what’s going on as to what the word stay means to me. Sometimes, it means connection – keeping what I’ve had and don’t want to lose. It can mean not acting for fear of losing what I think / feel I need – what I’m used to. Staying can be both calming and stressful, releasing and restraining, protecting and traumatic – sometimes all of these all at once as contradictory as they are. But, no matter I’m going through (or staying in) God is there with me and that is what I need most.
I do not have something wonderful to state as the meaning of stay. My first thoughts were if someone said “Stay” to me, I would not leave, would not move. I would remain where I was and wait.
Stay means to remain in one place and to quietly wait. Stay is a peaceful, quiet place of contemplation.
Stay means to be still and and read and listen for the word of God. It means to give to God all the bad feelings that make you want to leave instead of stay.
Stay is to remain and notice your emotions or feelings and allowed it to surface, what it is trying to tell you.
Staying for me means to keep my eyes heart and mind focused on Christ. Often in my quiet time with God I sit and try to be still and listen -but my mind wanders away -especially to all the negativity and news reports. How I just want to stay with Him and bask in His love—stay with my head on Hos shoulder with the confidence that He’s got me and He’s got all of this.
Stay. To pause. To wait. To ponder all the what if’s, why’s, and how’s that we want to know about. To truly listen and wait to hear God and what He wants me to do and know that He is right here with me. Knowing that looking deep inside and really seeing things About me I haven’t wanted to or been able to see will lead me to freedom with Hid help.
I’m tired of hurting me and others.
Stay,not running. I am a runner,hiding, always,all my life. My momma taught me to run.
Stay for me is a calling i have been receiving lately from ABBA. still so very hard to stay. I don’t physically run anymore, but my mind strays until He calls me back, diana, stay
STAY… Stay in the hurt, stay in the pain, stay in the shame, stay in the fear, stay in the anger, as you give all of these things to the Lord stay until he tells you you can go. Healing is hard and it’s a process. We must walk through it with the Lord and not try to climb around it or go under it or numb ourselves so that we don’t have to feel it… And I am learning that after God heals some of these things he may let you travel on for a few years but then he will bring you back to complete the process and that is where I am at right now… I am most definitely buy in this book…
Stay. Stand strong, tall and yield to Him even in our weakness. Wait for Him to do His work in us and know what He thinks is best for us.
1 You’re blessed when you stay on course, walking steadily on the road revealed by God. 2 You’re blessed when you follow his directions, doing your best to find him.” Psalm 119:1-2.
I have been studying that lately and trying to live by it.
To me…the word “Stay” most resignates in our ministry as pastor of a church plant. We will celebrate our church’s 5 year anniversary on May 4. We have encountered countless blessings, miracles and a great deal of spiritual warfare and struggle. I have been hurt by some of those closest to my heart. Some days, every fiber in my soul says to go..and yet, God says to “stay”. And trust and love and believe..His grace is indeed sufficient. To stay still and let Him be God. ❤️ I so needed this today.
Through this new season Stay has been, “sit with Me and wait awhile, listen for My voice, lets have some time to cover what you’ve read”…..My husband and I read a devotion and pray before he goes off to work. Then I read, right now Im reading “when the enemy strikes” by Charles Stanley. WOW! Take time sisters. And Stay..our Savior wants to speak to us????
I think to stay is to exhibit courage, to love, to obey God even in the most difficult. Too often I want to run away because it hurts so bad to stay. I believe God uses the moments where I listen to Him and stay to grow and transform me to become more like Christ. Sounds like an incredible book!
My gut reaction to stay or be still is punishment. Growing up with a father who could only deal with calm and unemotional, I spent a lot of time in my room until I could “calm down”.
Be still and know that I am God, has been my reluctant life verse. It pops up everywhere! I used to only focus on the Be still part and I would say I wish I could. But, it also say and KNOW that I am God.
So, stay to me means staying with him long enough to get to know him as a trusted friend. Staying in my feelings long enough for him to heal, redeem and restore me where I am cracked and broken.
I am in the process of learning how to stay with something the Lord is showing me instead of running to food to stuff things down. For me it is sitting and listening. “Be still and know that I am God.” Stay is being still for me.