Stepping Back
How many days do you get up, and before you even step out of the door, you are tired from thinking how much you must do that day? You turn on the morning news to see what happened overnight and find you are more stressed out by all the noise? Or you come in from a long day to find half of the house is without power, and your spouse is not a happy camper? We have all experienced these things and more in dealing with life. How do we cope?
Someone asked me a question a few weeks ago, “How do I read the Bible?” An honest question. Now, you can begin with Genesis and read chapter by chapter; however, I have found you will get confused and get lost by Numbers and then lose interest. For me, the Bible came to life when I was gifted a Message New Testament Bible. I continue to read my NIV version of the complete Bible. I love the scripture wording in Psalms, but when I read the Message Version of the Bible it comes to life and speaks to me like never before.
So, as a worship ministry, we are reading the New Testament in one year by reading a chapter a day every weekday. It takes no more than 5 minutes, and it starts my day off reading the word of God.
This week, I was reading Matthew Chapter 13, when the first lines just spoke to me.
13 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. 2 Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore.
I began to think to myself how many times I have stepped back and just said, "Give me a minute." Not nearly as much as I should have. Jesus had crowds of people following him, listening to him, wanting him to heal them, yet he still preached and healed, while he sat in a boat, alone. He needed to gather himself just as we need to step back ourselves.
I remember one instance; I was preparing for an Easter set up where the entire stage and stage set was taking on a completely different look for Easter morning. Rehearsal for Easter was in 6 hours and nothing, I mean nothing, was plugged in or set up, and I had 35 people coming for an Easter rehearsal expecting it to look the way it would for Easter. That morning, we had run into equipment issues, and there was a buzz coming from the sound system that we could not track down. The setup and the mic checks had to be performed to make sure the rehearsal would go smoothly. At this time, the youth director had a bunch of students who were going on a prayer walk around the campus. The students saw the stressful situation all the production team was in. We all gathered, and the students and youth director put us in the middle of a circle and each student placed a hand on the shoulder of each of us on the team and they prayed over us for at least 10 minutes. When we headed back into the Sanctuary to put everything together, the sound man found the buzz we had been working on for hours, two of us set the stage while the other people set all the props on the stage, and we were completely done with 2 hours to spare with everything working and ready for rehearsal.
All we had to do was step back and be calmly reminded that God is in control, and he has our backs.As we begin to roll into the holiday season, we will be stressed over something, it’s going to happen. Take the time to step back just as Jesus did.
FYI, the only thing wrong was that a GFI outlet had been tripped and caused a partial outage. Sometimes we just need to step back.
Give it a try and cancel out the noise and turn your focus on Jesus!