Remember in The Landscapes post how I said I had a “moment” in the chapel of the Iona Abbey?  It was just shortly after this photo was taken that I sat down along the isle’s right side, on a chair closest to the bottom of the photo above.  During the tourist season, this abbey would’ve been packed like sardines.  But on this drizzly day, it was just me.

After snapping a few photos, I sat in silence.  The air inside was damp and cool.  I pulled out my iPod Touch to open an already downloaded letter from one of my best friends, Breanna. She wrote so profoundly.  One note completely different from the others I’d received.  In it she spoke of my influence on her life, “You have shown me that I am imperfect, but that I can have joy in God’s process of refining me into valuable gold. For that is what I see you doing every day, ever more lately—you take the time to recognize His presence and whispering and calling in your life and through everything (good and bad and in-between), you have joy.”

To recognize His presence?  Do I really?  I had been traveling for nearly a week and was starting to feel like a complete phony, not recognizing Him hardly at all.  Before I left Colorado, I made this big deal about just “being still,” and during my first week of traveling I hadn’t really done that.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what it would look like.  Reading in a coffee shop alone?  Sitting on top of a mountain alone?  Or just spending my days, regardless of the activity, in silence?   So in that moment, I decided it was time to get serious.  In that abbey, I opened up.  I prayed for guidance on how to “be still” and I made a commitment to start listening. The Qavah kind of listening and waiting.  After wiping a couple tears from my cheek, I stood up and exited the abbey, continuing on my tour the ancient structure.

And as walked out the abbey’s door, I turned to my left and what I came across  in the next few steps nearly knocked me over in shock.  Sitting in a dark little corner, screaming at me with it’s presence, was this:

A bench.  A bench engraved with the words, “Be still.”

I was floored.

It’s like that bench knew I had traveled thousands of miles to “be still” and put itself in Iona, where I would have the ultimate “be still moment” the following day.

That post below, Renewal in Iona, happened the very next day after I stumbled upon this bench, engraved with my mantra. Looking back on my time in Iona, I recognize that this bench was total confirmation that I was in exactly the place I needed to be.

Simply amazing.