Selah-ing

       As I write this there is a summer heat advisory out and they are thinking that this will be the hottest day of the year.  It’s a good day to do nothing.  I saw someone do nothing once, it was a thing of beauty.   Most of us are always doing something; even on vacation we stay busy and active.   Have you ever talked to someone who had just gotten back from a vacation and were worn out from the travel schedule?  Once on vacation in Georgia my family and I stopped by a peach grove stand to buy some fresh peaches.  The temperature was about like it is today, which is to say hot enough to make the tar on the road melt.   Sitting perfectly still, leaned up against a tree was the proprietor of peach stand.  By “perfectly still”, I mean that our first reaction was that he must be dead.  No one is ever that still, no one ever does nothing so perfectly.   But, when we came up to the table to pay, he hopped up and took our money.   Being a little kid, and not knowing that there are certain things you should not say, I told him, “wow, we thought you were dead!”  He just smiled at me and said, “Nope, I was just sitting and pondering.” 

    Selah.  That is a word used in the Psalms.  It often appears between verses or stanzas in the Psalms.  We have a hard time translating it for the Bible because it isn’t actually part of the text of the Psalm.  It’s more like directions on what to do with what you have just read (or sung since the Psalms were written as songs).  Most literally translated it means “pause and reflect”… although you could also say, “sit and ponder”.    So that’s what the guy at the peach stand was doing, he was Selah-ing. 

    Sometimes I think God gives us weather so profoundly hot, or snowy cold that we are forced to Selah because doing anything is out of the question.   I am also fairly certain that “he who hesitates is lost” is only true when you have “looked before you leap”.   How many of us really pause and reflect, either before we do something or after.  I’m not talking about worrying about something before it happens or second guessing it after; I mean really pausing and reflecting.   Asking ourselves the hard questions about our lives and then pausing to reflect on the answers can be scary… maybe that is why we stay so busy.  It keeps us from having to face that scary Selah. 

  So as we all sit near to our air-conditioning and drink lots of fluid, let’s stop to thank God for blisteringly hot days that force us to Selah.  May you have a nice “Sit and Ponder”.  Oh, and by the way, the peaches were amazingly good.