The Slower Rhythms

We live in a society that wants things now. Things that used to take 5-10 business days, we expect to come as fast as Amazon Prime. Renting movies used to take a 15 minute drive to Blockbuster, 20 minutes in the store and then the drive home, but now we expect our smart TVs to pull up Netflix in 0.75 seconds (heaven-forbid it has to buffer first). And projects that used to take years, now take months.

The world demands we work at lightning speeds. And honestly, it sucks.

I can only go so fast. I can only do so much. And it sucks to admit when you can’t do it all.

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After my first year of work, I just couldn’t keep up. When I thought I conquered it, more stuff came flying at me and I had to try to keep up. One person put it this way, “When I think I defeated a new level of stress, a higher level of stress comes along.”

Then, I read this quote out of the book Univited by Lysa TerKeurst:

Since my fast-paced chase had gotten me into this mess, I knew it would take slow moments to get me out of it. I needed to reconnect with the One who knows how to breath life and love back into depleted and dead places. Jesus doesn’t participate in the rat race. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling - all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him.

Boom! Cue gut-wrenching tears of conviction. Read that again:

“He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling - all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him.”

I could only go so fast. I could only do so much. And it sucked to admit when I couldn’t do it all. You know why? Because none of this is about me.

God didn’t call me to be the fastest working APM. God didn’t call me to be the best human alive. God didn’t call me to save the world. God calls me to worship Him. And true worship begins with me simply saying, “I trust You.”

But you see I wasn’t trusting Him. I was relying on my own strength. I was going to continue to crash and burn until I truly surrendered.

And so when I read this quote, I wrote it down. And this quote sat in a notebook for months. I continued to rely on myself until I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore.

One night I was thumbing through my filled-up journals with tears streaming down my face and saw this. I prayed over it. I prayed over it for days. I kept asking God, “What does it mean? Why won’t it get out of my head? How do I apply it?”

And that’s when my journey began. A journey I want to share with you for the next few weeks - my journey to discovering how to abide, delight, and dwell.