Today, I want to talk to you about something that I wrestle with all the time.  I've actually even made it a four-letter word in our home.  It's something that I do not like people telling me to do this thing. Can anybody guess what it is? If you're anything like me then, you automatically know the word is r e s t.  It is a four-letter word, I don't like it. It is not something that I am very good at, but it's definitely something that the Lord has been convicting me about, and I want to share some of that with you.  And first, I want to let you know that when people have trauma in their past, it is a natural human instinct to try to do things to fill up your mind so whether it's a project or a list, whatever works for you.  Whatever you can get into your mind, other than your thoughts about your past then it just makes things seem easier.  So we tend to fill up our lives with so many people busy with their work, you know the busier they are then the more important they must be. But the Bible is very, very clear that it's not just a suggestion to rest. In fact, in the Old Testament, there's a whole commandment of keeping the Sabbath. Now, we're not going to get into that today, but it's very clear that God is serious about rest and we're going to talk in a minute about how God rested in the Old Testament and gives us an example of that and how Jesus himself rested when he was walking the earth and giving us an example of what to do. But what I want to talk to you about today is the word, still and it means calm and quiet. Okay, now I have four children. That is not something that I get a lot of in our household, especially with two littles.  There are two little girls who love to scream all the time. I did not know they liked to do that. So calm and quiet is something that you have to seek out. So that is something that Jesus taught us to do when he was walking the earth. If you think about it when you are about to have a conversation with someone on the phone. Do you walk into the middle of chaos and have this conversation with them? If you're like me, you walk out with your phone and you try to find a place so that they can hear you, and you can hear them. Well, how much more important is it for us when we want to hear from the Lord and find a place of calm and quiet. And so many of us struggle to do that because I know for myself when I go to a place of calm and quiet when it's dead silent in this house, which isn't often, but when it is, my mind seems to go to what it thinks about the most, and that is just a natural default to things that have happened to me.  Because I, by nature a protector, I want to protect myself from getting hurt again.  I want to protect my children, so I can very easily go to those negative thoughts and feelings, and that's not where God wants our minds. And so, I'm going to give you a couple of scriptures that have really been helpful for me as to the instruction from the Lord so that we know it's not just a suggestion, but it's something he wants us to do. In Psalms 37:7 it says, “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.”