Do you try to find a little quiet space in the day when you come before the Lord in complete emptiness, so that His holy presence can fill your heart and calm your spirit? What peace it is to let fall before Him everything earthly, those things which worry and press so insistently for our attention, and then, quite simply, to offer up our hearts in loving adoration, trying to focus steadily on Him, His beauty and majesty, His merciful tenderness and changeless care for His own. To do this is to find things wonderfully simplified. The “look” of them is surprisingly altered. What weighed heavily on our minds diminishes to featherweight in His presence. Since all great concerns, both ours and those of the people we love, belong to Him who made us, we may turn them explicitly over to Him, not as a careless ridding ourselves of them, but committing them to the hands in which we can be sure they are safe. This relinquishment assigns things to their proper places, and we are helped to see them then in God’s view—a very different perspective from our own.
This excerpt was originally published in the July/August 1992 Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter.