Be Still

Hello again and welcome to Become a Competent Biblical Counselor. This is Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is titled Be Still. And the scripture verse we're going to use today is in Psalms 46, 10, where it says, Be still and know that I am God. This is a very interesting topic to discuss today, and I want to go over it with you because many times, I should say quite often, people will call me and they will say they're just whipped. They are just burned out. They are just done. And I will ask them, well, what is the it that you can't take anymore? And they say, the amount of time that I don't have. I am so busy with the kids, with my husband, with the house, with homework as I'm a student, with so much going on, and they're just beat up and they can't get any source of relaxation or escape from all of the stress that they are undergoing. And so I want to discuss with you when you get people calling you like this that it's a matter of be still. The answer very quickly could be be still. Now, what does that mean? We're going to get into that today. I'm going to give you some suggestions of some things you can do to actually help people to be still. I ran across a very enlightening and unusual way to interpret this verse. And I want to share it with you because I think it it uh it sheds a different light on what I'm trying to get across. And see what you think of this. Uh it says the the person who's writing this is in that light, the tone of this verse can be read. Stop striving, stop fighting, stop trying to do things on your own. Stop stressing about the battle ahead and trust me, wake up. I am the Lord. I am your refuge and your strength. You have nothing to fear or worry about when I am with you. I will fight your battles and deal with your enemies, so get out of my way. Step back, open your eyes, and acknowledge who I am and what I can do. Let me be God. Don't try and do my job for me. Be patient, be still, and let me go to work. So it's a different approach, and it's uh, I suppose could be quite controversial to some people, but it's just the point is be still. God is saying, I understand this too. We've had other episodes too where a lot of things in the Bible that are suggestions and taken as suggestions are not. We should take them as commands. Well, take this as command, where the Bible says, and God says, be still. Whether you feel like it or not, whether you understand it or not, just stop and be still. How do you do that? Well, let's get into that and we'll put some other highlights on it as well. There's a book entitled Stolen Focus by Johan Hari that uh he takes this matter and adds some scientific clarity to the task at hand. For example, there's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our life really are speeding up. People talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just 20 years, people have started to walk 10% faster in cities. We read faster. We skim instead of actually taking our time and reading and concentrating on information that's to be imparted in the written word. And we do everything at a much faster pace. That's why we have microwave ovens. So very quickly you might say, well, so what happens to a person's focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices like yoga or tai chi or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies that have shown that they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. You see, we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth. If you go too fast, you overload your abilities and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature and you build that into your daily life, you begin to train your attention and focus. In other words, slowness nurtures attention and speed shatters it. There's one key fact that every human being needs to understand, and that is your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind. That's it. We are very, very single-minded. We have very limited cognitive capacity. This is because of the fundamental structure of the brain, and it is not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. We took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things or more simultaneously. They call this machine multitasking. Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves. And the conclusion today, whether some people acknowledge this or not, or believe it or not, is that our ability to think about several things at once is a delusion. That means when people think they're doing several things at once, they're actually juggling. What they're really doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task, and that comes at a cost. And what does that cost? I can't keep up with everything that I've got to do. I can't respond to my responsibilities the way I should. I just can't keep going like this. I'm getting sick, I'm getting delusional, I'm imagining things, and I can't get any rest, I can't get any escape. That is the cost, or one of the costs, so-called multitasking. So as you talk to your counselees, asking questions and getting more details with respect to what is this dogma that they've gotten themselves into, you could actually help them to realize and agree with them that they're right, that they've got just too much on their plate, and this is something that they are responsible for. They are the ones who are bringing on more and more of these additional responsibilities. So if you discover that your counselee spends more time switching, then the evidence suggests that they will be slower, they'll make more mistakes, they'll be less creative, and they'll remember a lot less of what they need to. Here's a sad statistic that I found. It says that the average American worker is distracted roughly once every three minutes. The average office worker now spends forty percent of their time wrongly believing they are multitasking, which means they are incurring all of these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day. Most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted. And the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes every day. So in thinking about what your counselor has told you and what their life looks like, you can just see how and why they are so confused and totally stressed. And so we now use our phones also so habitually that I don't think we consider doing a task or checking our phones at the same time as multitasking. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every 10 minutes while you try to work is itself a form of multitasking. And these costs start to kick in at the same time. And if we are confused with understanding just how much multitasking involves our phones, imagine what we do in the car. We are changing the radio stations, we are talking on the phone, we are looking outside at the traffic, complaining about the traffic, we are doing so much multitasking while driving our cars that one of the fastest rising causes of death in the world is distracted driving. Persistent distractions have as bad an effect on your attention on the road as consuming so much alcohol that you got drunk. Quite a comparison, huh? The distractions all around us aren't just annoying, they are deadly. Around one in five car accidents is now due to a distracted driver. So the summary thought on this particular issue is if you want to do things well, you need to focus carefully on one thing at a time. And you need to drive that point home to your counselee. One thing at a time is what you've been built to do, what you've been trained to do, what you're wired to do. Try not to do so much. As God's word says, be still. What do you mean by that? How do I do it? Anyway, stay with me. At the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a formula and a and a concept that you can actually give to your counselees to help them get that across. So having said that, the best we can do now is to try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible. You have to let your counselee know that they are responsible for allowing the distractions to take place in the first place. And they have to start re-evaluating what their day looks like, what their so-called responsibilities are. Are they really that important? And they've really got to ask some questions with respect to what things can they stand up and be responsible for from God's point of view. What is important to God that you get completed today, as opposed to those habits or those culture preferences that manage to get in between what we're supposed to do and what we are really doing. Your counselee can achieve progress on all of this starting today, but it's going to take work. But that's the whole purpose of biblical counseling anyway, is to put off the old and to put on the new. So, how do we do that? This is what you can say to your counselee. The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connections getting, and the better things work. If your counselee is struggling to focus, have them try monotasking for 10 minutes and then allow themselves to be distracted for one minute, then monetize for another 10 minutes and so on. As they do it, it becomes more familiar. Their brain gets better and better at it because they're strengthening the neural connections involved in that behavior. And pretty soon they can do it for 15 minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, you know? Tell them they must do it. They must practice at it. Tell them to start slow, but practice and they will get there. And also tell them to achieve this. They're going to have to separate themselves for increasing periods of time from the sources of the stresses and the irresponsible habits that they're taking on and other distractions. It's a mistake to try to monetask by force of will because it's too hard to resist the informational tap on the shoulder. And one very important last comment that I want to get across to you. If you get nothing out of this episode, get this. For people to continue being stressed with all the irresponsible things that they're doing in their lives and the distractions they've allowed in their lives, and in violation of the command that God gives us to be still, let them know that they may be so involved with multitasking that they could miss the quiet whispers of the Holy Spirit. Let that sink in. So I've enjoyed sharing this with you today. It's something that I have to do in my own life quite constantly is to be still. What a thought that is, what a concept that is, and what a relief it is to know that God is there with us, and we need to be still. We don't need to take on all the stuff that we've taken on. God says be still. Thanks for joining us, and we'll uh talk to you later.

Bye.