Slow Down... and Soak.

This is your assignment for Life, starting now.  Slow down!  And allow the presence of Jesus pictured so powerfully on His lips and in His Life to soak deeply into your heart, soul, mind and strength.  Slowing down is the way the soul flourishes; it’s the way the heart was made to work.  Robert Baron writes, “The deepest part of the soul likes to go slow.  Since it seeks to savor rather than to accomplish, it wants to rest in and contemplate the good rather than hurry off to another place.”  Your assignment is to, in the words of Dallas Willard, “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”  It is to slow down, to savor, to rest and contemplate.

Slowing the pace of your light-speed life means, by necessity, eliminating hurry on one hand and intentionally creating ‘margin’ on the other.  Get direct, intentional, confrontational with the demands and activities in your day to day life.  If it’s not an absolute necessity {follow me closely here}, get rid of it.  That’s right, eliminate it!  What you’ll discover is there’s more room now for the Spirit to move, for you to breathe the free air of grace every moment, and for others as well.  There is space for other hearts to dwell at ease in your own.  Make sense?

In the Middle Ages, Christians would engage in some rather extreme ascetic practices like lengthy fasts and self-flagellation to discipline themselves with the purpose, the often unsuccessful intent, of growing toward God.  A post-modern society, especially a post-Christian one, needs something entirely different today.  Paul Evdokimov wisely observed, “Today, the combat is not the same.  We no longer need added pain.  Hair shirts, chains, and flagellation would risk uselessly breaking us.  Today, mortification would be liberation from every kind of addiction: speed, noise, alcohol, and all kinds of stimulants.  Asceticism would be necessary rest.  The discipline of regular periods of calm and silence where one could regain the ability to stop for prayer and contemplation even in the heart of all the noise of the world.”  As author James Bryan Smith notes, “We are driven by speed and stimulants, and thus the most needed discipline is for us to slow down, to calm down, and to make time for rest and contemplation.  We cannot slow down,” however, “until we know how to practice ‘margin.’  ...We have to begin cutting out activities before we can begin to change the pace of our lives.”

This is going to take direct, intentional, confrontational engagement on your part.  Like all things good and beautiful and holy and true, it doesn’t happen by accident.  Nor in a vacuum.  It happens because you’ve sought divine direction on how to slow the pace of a light-speed life, trusted the Truth when Jesus gives it to you, then acted upon it faithfully as one of His Followers.  And it won’t happen any other way.  The enemy of your heart, the “thief” {Jn. 10:10} of all things good and beautiful and holy and true, does not want you living from a place of rest and joy and faith in the Father’s heart.  That I can promise you.  His policy today is simple: ‘Keep ‘em running.  Move, move, move, move, move.  We’ll wear ‘em out... then we’ll take ‘em out.’  And that’s precisely what he does.  A heart that is weary and worn from too much time on the Front Lines, emotionally drained and physically exhausted from one school / dance / sport / church / social activity after another, a marriage dying on the vine for lack of nurture and cultivation, is a primed and perfect target for the arrows of the enemy.  A weary heart famished for love and desperately needing renewal and restoration is an easy target.  And your adversary knows it... well.


Ric Webb

Shepherd
Heart's Journey Community

www.hjcommunity.org