Merry Monday by Parris Bailey. Less is more!
“I sat down in His shade with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” SOS 2:3
So I have come full circle. I truly think God does sit in the heavens and laugh. I’m sure we look like a bunch of grasshoppers. We just moved, call it downsizing, common sense, getting old, empty nesters, I call it having less is more. We moved back into a house exactly the same size as our first house 30 years ago. Our kids raised and gone, our house had way too many steps, though beautiful, just wasn’t practical. Somehow all that extra space was filled with nothingness. We decided to “sit down under his shadow and enjoy his fruit”. We were able to snatch this little cottage 20 steps from Audubon Park after 3 garage sales, a Salvation Army truck load pick up, and my kids literally rolling out with U-Hauls full of stuff. My life has become one long edit, Yes, his fruit alone becomes so satisfying. Augustine said it well when he said its hard to have Christ when our hands are full of stuff. Wow-that’s convicting!
A.B. Simpson says it like this, “So He wants to give us rest, to cover us with His shadow, to make us sit down under it with great delight, but we must sit down if we would know His rest. We must cease from our own activity and we must be willing to go into the shadow, lost to the sight of ourselves, lost to the sight of others, overshadowed by what they might call gloom, or even shadow. But it is the shadow of the Almighty, and oh! the delight of those who sit down and trust where they cannot see! The most that we need to do to get rest is simply to rest, to cease from what we are thinking, questioning, planning, fearing, to suppress ourselves, to stop thinking, to stop trying, to stop listening, to stop answering the tempter, to hide our heads on the bosom of Jesus and let Him think and love and keep, seeing nothing but the shadow of our Beloved which hides everything else, even the light of our way, from our view.”
Don’t get me wrong, I needed the space when I had four kids coming and going. Keeping the apple tree in focus throughout our lives helps us make the transition from one phase of life to the next. Let Him hide you in his precious shadow. Simpson goes on to say “But this is truly the very element of the life of prayer. It is an interior life. Its home is “the secret place of the most High,” and its dwelling, “the shadow of the Almighty.” It is the intercourse of an inseparable divine companionship. It is Enoch walking with God. It is Elisha clinging to his master and saying, “As the Lord liveth and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.” It is the very breathing of the inner man, and is as necessary and unintermittent as the pulsation of a human heart and the respiration of a human bosom.”
Go ahead, do some editing. And lo and behold you just might find that apple tree.