Keeping a quiet heart.

(I’ll be back to the love meditations later this week after finals end.)

Keeping a quiet heart is difficult.  Rushing questions, busy thoughts, and churning emotions.  What does this heart know of stillness?  It is often a striving spirit rather than a still one.

Times of solitude in some “hiding place” somewhere is good for our soul.  It’s good to come ashore for a while and quietly think on the Master, to again refocus our affections on Him.  Then does the dust of life somewhat settle and again the vision is clear: Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.  Naught be all else to me save that Thou art.

This is how a quiet heart is cultivated: in the pure pursuit of one thing, with the peace of Christ ruling and reigning over the whole realm of my heart, my mind, and my life.  Peace is the tranquil state of a soul assured in Christ.

Jesus slept on a pillow in the midst of a raging storm.  How could He?  The terrified disciples, sure that the next wave would send them straight to the bottom, shook Him awake with rebuke.  How could He be so careless of their fate?

He could because He slept in the calm assurance that His Father was in control.  His was a quiet heart.  We see Him move serenely through all the events of His life — when He was reviled, He did not revile in return.  When He knew that He would suffer many things and be killed in Jerusalem, He never deviated from His course.  He had set His face like a flint.  He sat at supper with one who would deny Him and another who would betray Him, yet He was able to eat with them, willing even to wash their feet.  Jesus in the unbroken intimacy of His Father’s love, kept a quiet heart.

(Elisabeth Elliot)

More like Jesus would I be.