WE ALL NEED OUR OLIVET! I read this line this morning and the truth of it struck me. It was referring to that quiet place of separation from the hammer of life. That “alone with God” space that we all need. What stress we all live with in our world. There must be an escape valve. There must be a way to release the pressure that builds in all of us. Otherwise there is a form of internal combustion. We can call it by different names. Nerves, anxiety, stress, OCD, insomnia….the list goes on and on. An extreme form is post traumatic stress disorder. In some cases the result can be extreme depression or addiction or even killing rages. In everyone ‘s life rain does fall, plans go awry, dreams die, regrets fill us, tragedies sideline us. No one is exempted.
How shall we cope? As a physician, I have watched people try many ways, but there is only one that truly works long term. The Olivet. It is the means to “get away” and access the wisdom needed to ascertain truth or have your vision realigned so that you are able to weather any storm. Storms of loss or loneliness, illness or poverty, fear or regret.
One of my biblical heroes is Daniel. I named my son after this man. The biblical Daniel was, as a teen, ripped from his home and made a slave in a foreign land. He saw brutality and warfare. He knew the immense loss of having everything he held dear stripped from him at a young age through no fault of his own. But he had his Olivet, amidst Babylon’s noisy world, by a window in his upper room. It is where he went to escape the world and commune with God. Though it landed him in a den of lions it also kept him sane. He found the strength and wisdom to cope. We can learn from men like him.
We live in such a broken world. We are all constantly in danger of falling apart. And physically we all eventually do! Death is that reminder of our need for something this world will never offer. It is a historically, well-documented fact that here has only been one to conquer death and rise again. And we need to have communion with Him. And even He, when he was here, had his Olivet where he communed with the Father.
