Peace, Be Still

Time is the one thing we can never get back, so maybe we should just be still more often.

The unrestrained joy of my 17-month-old granddaughter when I shot her with those little fuzzy pompoms through an empty toilet paper roll was a total blast. I was thinking about that and her laughter today and about the things we used to do, and I began to realize that many—not all, but many—of them no longer exist, and those that do are severely bastardized to the point they’re unrecognizable.

I remember how excited we were to drive an hour and a half to Memphis, not just to see the first showing of Star Wars in 1977, but to get there early enough to stand in line for two hours to get tickets and THEN go see it. What is immediate to us today took pretty much all day nearly fifty years ago, but there was something electric about that waiting, that shared anticipation with strangers who’d become fellow travelers in a story none of us had seen yet. The experience was the thing itself—the drive, the line, the collective gasp when the star destroyer rumbled across the screen.

Simple things like dragging a flat-bottomed boat over a levee and down into the Tallahatchie River to spend a weekend on the riverbank night fishing for catfish and having a cookout right there in the riverbank camp. Or maybe finding a pool that had been blown out by a heavy rain that was deep enough on a nearby creek to swim in on a hot summer day, the water so cold it took your breath away, and nobody worried about whether you’d checked the water quality index online first.

I know that redneck stuff isn’t for everybody, and it probably sounds pretty lowbrow to some folks reading this. But looking back, we were having the time of our lives and just didn’t know it. We didn’t document it for social media or curate the experience. We just lived it, got mosquito-bit, sunburned, and went home with creek sand in pretty much every orifice and stories about the 30-pound cat that broke our line or the six-foot alligator gar that we wrestled into our boat and then tossed it over into my uncle’s boat when he and my cousin weren’t looking, the seeing them bail out of the boat when the gar decided he wanted back in the river.

I get that life changes and moves on. Progress brings real improvements—I’m not romanticizing everything about the past. But some things are worth saving just as they are. Not every experience needs to be optimized, upgraded, or made more efficient. Sometimes the inconvenience was part of what made it memorable. The effort required to drag that boat over the levee made the fishing sweeter (the dragging it and the gear out kind of sucked, though). The two-hour wait made Star Wars feel like an event rather than content.

All this thinking is hard on an old man, but I did remember what Jesus said in Mark, Chapter 4, verse 39:

“Peace, be still.”

Jesus calmed a storm as he said this, symbolizing the ability to find peace amid chaos.

Watching my granddaughter’s face light up over a handful of bright, fuzzy pompoms and a cardboard tube reminded me that the best moments are often the simplest ones—the ones that can’t be improved upon or replicated with some sort of an enhancement.

Maybe we miss the moments that have the potential to define us as people. Maybe the real thing is worth preserving because the willingness to be fully present in unremarkable moments and be still until they blossom into something remarkable yields the greatest form of happiness possible.

Peace, be still.