Gertrude Puelicher died in 1999, She was a teacher at Riverside High School and wrote articles in the newspaper and had a TV show "The Other 98" which focused on children who were a credit to their families and communities. Hope you enjoy this article.
Do you long to be lifted out of the tension and pressure of today's fast pace? Do you long for a solitude that will permit you to catch your breath? That will give you time even to indulge in so deep a breath that gradually a slow flooding of peace throughout your being will release itself?
Do you long to be lifted out of the tension and pressure of today's fast pace? Do you long for a solitude that will permit you to catch your breath? That will give you time even to indulge in so deep a breath that gradually a slow flooding of peace throughout your being will release itself?
"October's bright blue weather" is a beckoning finger if you have the courage to follow it northward to a lake whose pine-shadowed shore is ruffled with intimate little bays. Motorboats roaring importantly all summer long from one fishing bar to another have long since been silenced. Young water skiers flirting impudently with speed and sudden spills have disappeared into their classrooms.
If you will settle into a chair, any kind of lounge chair placed on the pier, and let your thinking go where it wants to go, you will find yourself seeing and hearing strangely comfortable things. At your left, water bugs darting in half a dozen directions at once overlap each other in their silly, jerky, jettisoning, as though their world was as important as the one from which you had just fled.
At your right, a fish splashed and is gone, silently disappearing in ever widening circles, the only evidence of his brief presence. There is something effortlessly soothing in watching circles in the water smooth themselves out of existence.
Along the opposite shore, in the red and gold reflections of a setting sun a doe splashes along contentedly. Occasionally she raises her head, stares down the lake, sniffs into the wind, and then resumes her slow trek in the shallow leaf-strewn water.
Even the loon, laughing crazily at his own antics, fails to disturb you. Settled low in your chair, you have by now lost all sense of earth-bound limitation. The naturalness spread out before you has made you a part of itself. No longer are you boxed in by the pettiness, frictions, turmoil, unconscious resentments and exacting demands of daily living. No longer are you pushing buttons to meet deadlines. No longer is the heavy breathing of a seemingly important schedule pressing against your eardrums.
You are quiet now, quiet and at peace throughout your whole being. All you hear is the silence of approaching night. Startlingly clear comes the thought, illumined in the beginning twilight: When God answered sorely-pressed Elijah, God wasn't in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire any more than He is in the pressures and tensions and frustrations of our human existence. God was in the "still small voice" to which Elijah listened, the voice within each of us if we will but take time to listen.
And then comes the revelation that really rests you---your mind has become a closed circuit to everything but God.
If you will settle into a chair, any kind of lounge chair placed on the pier, and let your thinking go where it wants to go, you will find yourself seeing and hearing strangely comfortable things. At your left, water bugs darting in half a dozen directions at once overlap each other in their silly, jerky, jettisoning, as though their world was as important as the one from which you had just fled.
At your right, a fish splashed and is gone, silently disappearing in ever widening circles, the only evidence of his brief presence. There is something effortlessly soothing in watching circles in the water smooth themselves out of existence.
Along the opposite shore, in the red and gold reflections of a setting sun a doe splashes along contentedly. Occasionally she raises her head, stares down the lake, sniffs into the wind, and then resumes her slow trek in the shallow leaf-strewn water.
Even the loon, laughing crazily at his own antics, fails to disturb you. Settled low in your chair, you have by now lost all sense of earth-bound limitation. The naturalness spread out before you has made you a part of itself. No longer are you boxed in by the pettiness, frictions, turmoil, unconscious resentments and exacting demands of daily living. No longer are you pushing buttons to meet deadlines. No longer is the heavy breathing of a seemingly important schedule pressing against your eardrums.
You are quiet now, quiet and at peace throughout your whole being. All you hear is the silence of approaching night. Startlingly clear comes the thought, illumined in the beginning twilight: When God answered sorely-pressed Elijah, God wasn't in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire any more than He is in the pressures and tensions and frustrations of our human existence. God was in the "still small voice" to which Elijah listened, the voice within each of us if we will but take time to listen.
And then comes the revelation that really rests you---your mind has become a closed circuit to everything but God.
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