*Contemplating Psalm 62:5 and Matthew 7:13-14*

Did you ever get a song stuck in your head or a tune that keeps popping up in your mind and you have no idea why? It begs for attention and so you lean into it, you stop fighting it and you release the tune into the atmosphere. This happens to me a lot. I’ll start belting out the lyrics to a Christmas song, but it’s springtime. I’ll open my curtains in the morning to look out my bedroom window and look out across the
landscape from our mountain and start singing (with vigor and vibrato), “The hills are alive with the sound of music”. Sometimes things just stick in my mind, heart, and soul and I embrace it and let it flow.

However, I’ve been in a season (since my surgery and recovery time) where the music has silenced, and I’m distinctly aware that there is fragility in this life I’m living. And that fragility is silent and, yet it begs to be heard. What has been seared into my heart in this time of uncanny silence is Matthew 7:13-14 about the wide and narrow gate. The narrow gate? I’ve been asking God, “What is it about the narrow gate that I need to know right now, in this moment?” I ponder: Am I overlooking the narrow gate?

In Psalm 46:10 God speaks to say, “Be still and know that I am God.” Psalms 62:5 (TPT) the writer declares, “I am standing in absolute stillness, silent before the one I love, waiting as long as it takes for him to rescue me. Only God is my Savior, and he will not fail me.” In this fast-paced, constant noise and clamoring of the world right now, am I willing to be still? Am I willing to stand in absolute stillness, silent before the One I love, waiting as long as it takes for Him to rescue me? Did I forget that I still need to be
rescued? Is that part of the narrow gate, Lord? Did I need to learn that the narrow gate is only visible when it is opened by my Rescuer?

At this, the song returns, and the melodic tune begins to resonate within me. The verse and then the refrain: “Trust and obey. For there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” I’m singing
again. I hope you meet God in the moments of silence… and then you are willing to break the silence by lifting up the song that resonates from your soul up to heaven, where it meets with your Rescuer.
~Pastor Kim