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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
- The 2014 Christianity Today Book Award of Merit Winner (Spirituality)"I am a recovering speed addict." Beginning with this confession, pastor and spiritual director Alan Fadling describes his journey out of the fast lane and into the rhythms of Jesus. Following the framework of Jesus' earthly life, Fadling shows how the work of "unhurrying" ourselves is central to our spiritual development in pivotal areas such as resisting temptation, caring for others, praying, and making disciples. We are all called to do work, Fadling affirms, and productivity is not a sin—it is the attitudes behind our work that can be our undoing. So how do we find balance between our sense of calling and the call to rest? An Unhurried Life offers a way. This revised edition, now in hardcover, includes a new five-session group guide and appendix with suggestions for five-minute retreats.
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Contents
PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
I’m still a recovering speed addict. Finding freedom from my bad habits of soul hurry continues to be a critical pursuit in my life and work. Like my friends in recovery from addictions to alcohol, drugs or other dynamics in their lives, I’ve found that my recovery continues to be a one-day-at-a-time journey. I’ve come to expect that this will be true for the rest of my life.
Pursuing an unhurried life in the spirit of Jesus has proven far more fruitful than I imagined when I first wrote this book. I’m finding these insights to be a catalyst for soul health and productive work for people I interact with around the world.
I’ve had the opportunity to talk about these insights with people in many different organizational, cultural and international contexts. I’m grateful to find that the idea of living unhurried with Jesus is not only helpful in a Western context, but it appears to be a universal human experience.
The insights of chapter seven, “Rest: The Rhythm of Creation,” continue to be key for me. For example, I still wrestle with a tendency to numb rather than rest. Of course, the challenge is that when we numb, we no longer feel tired. But when the numbness wears off, we are just more tired. This tempts us to even more numbing. It can become a debilitating cycle.
When we numb our tiredness, it’s never a local anesthesia. Numbing affects every facet of our lives, and this often causes us to be asleep and susceptible to misguided impulses and inclinations. My habit of numbing can also look like escaping, self-distracting, avoiding or hiding. I’m learning what real rest looks like, how it awakens me to the presence of God with me, and how I find creativity, energy, vision and courage to engage my life and my work more fruitfully.
My conviction has deepened that rest really does come first and that it is the fertile soil in which the best kind of kingdom work grows. No matter where I go around the world, I’m seeing this work produce good and lasting fruit. “Rest first” is proving to be the seminal idea in this book that is gaining the most traction.
When An Unhurried Life was published seven years ago, there were two main sources for the ideas it contained. First and foremost there was biblical work I had done in the Gospels, reflecting on the life of Jesus and whether, as Dallas Willard had suggested, he was relaxed. Working with a vision of Jesus as relaxed—as unhurried—became a critical place of learning, insight and, eventually, teaching for me in my leadership development work.
The second source of ideas and content were a few core presentations I had been giving for years. I had been speaking on themes such as how rest and work relate, how God prunes the fruitful branch so that it will become even more fruitful, and how we cooperate with God in the journey toward wholeness, holiness and maturity.
A few years ago, my wife, Gem, and I began to receive more and more invitations to speak and train on the core ideas of An Unhurried Life. As a result, we launched a new nonprofit called Unhurried Living as a home for this growing work. It has felt like a place where the convergence of our life with God and our work with God can grow and develop.
If I were to guess, the challenge of living unhurried inside when our culture is so hurried on the outside has only increased. I believe the insights of this book are more needed today than they were seven years ago.
In addition to this new preface, this revised and expanded edition has a new appendix with some five-minute practices that have been helping me unhurry during my busy days. Also new is a group guide to complement the original reflection questions at the end of each chapter. These additions will guide you in putting into practice the insights of An Unhurried Life.
A FRENETIC LIFE
I’m a recovering speed addict—and I don’t mean the drug. I’m talking about the inner pace of my life. I always seemed to be in a hurry. I was the guy who looked for the fastest-moving lane on the freeway, the shortest checkout line at the grocery store and the quickest way to finish a job. It’s probably pathological. But, like you, I also live in a hurried culture. I’m not the only one trying to get there more quickly and do things faster. In fact, there is little incentive out there to slow down. And the pace in the church doesn’t seem all that different from the pace in the world around us.
My journey of recovery, my journey toward a more unhurried life, began when I was in my twenties. At the time I was a full-time college pastor, a full-time student at Fuller Theological Seminary and a new husband. I’m sad to say my priorities were pretty much in that order. I hadn’t been in ministry long when a crisis hit. I was convinced that God had invited me to serve his purposes as the focus of my vocational life. But I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to continue to do ministry or to live life in the manner or at the pace I had been maintaining. I knew I wouldn’t be able to last for many more years or even months, let alone for three or four more decades. My lifestyle was unsustainable. Only in my twenties, I was already showing signs of burnout.
It was at that time that I enrolled in a new Fuller Seminary course titled Collegiate Leadership and Discipleship. My position as a college pastor made the class an obvious choice. While I’m sure I gained many good insights into leading a college ministry, those aren’t what I remember. Instead, I remember that built into the course were a couple of daylong retreats that gave me an extended time of solitude and silence with God. The first retreat provoked in me withdrawal-from-busyness symptoms rivaling those of drug addicts during their first week of rehab. I didn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t solving something, going somewhere or helping someone. The hurried pace of my inner life was exposed. There was nothing I could do at the retreat center except listen and no one I could be with except God himself. That retreat marked the beginning of a journey I have now been on for more than twenty years. And I’m still in recovery.
WAS JESUS RELAXED?
As I’ve traveled this journey, a few words of counsel have guided me. I remember reading what John Ortberg was told during a season of ministry transition in his life: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”1 Connecting ruthlessness and unhurry has been a fruitful piece of spiritual direction for me. In The Life You’ve Always Wanted, Ortberg suggests that “hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”2 And I agree. When I’m talking about hurried and unhurried, I’m not just talking about miles per hour. I’m talking about an anxious, driven, frenetic heart.
More recently, my friend Bill had a conversation with Dallas Willard,3 who has mentored many in a lifestyle of spiritual transformation. Dallas asked Bill a simple question: “If you had one word to describe Jesus, what would it be?” What word would you choose? Teacher? Lord? Compassionate? Many words would fit. After Bill thought awhile, Dallas offered his own word. It was relaxed. Relaxed? Really? That word would not have been on my list. It wasn’t on Bill’s either. Was it on yours?
Part of me isn’t comfortable with the word relaxed. It sounds lazy, disengaged, selfish. When Bill told me that story, though, I knew I had to investigate the idea that Jesus was relaxed. What took root in my own heart was the desire to know Jesus as an unhurried Savior. I scheduled for myself a three-day personal retreat and spent the bulk of that time reviewing the Gospels and asking myself over and over, Was Jesus really relaxed? Was he actually unhurried?
As the hours became days, it became more and more clear to me that he was definitely more unhurried than the people around him were. After waiting thirty years to begin his ministry, his first ministry act was to follow the Spirit into forty days in the wilderness. His own brothers urged him to do some publicity if he wanted to be a public figure, but Jesus didn’t bite (Jn 7:4-6). He seemed frustratingly unhurried on his way to heal the synagogue official’s daughter (Mk 5:22-43) and to visit his sick friend Lazarus, who died during Jesus’ two-day delay (Jn 11:1-43). His sense of timing often puzzled those around him.
Jesus’ unhurried pace also stands in stark contrast to our twenty-first-century pace. Consider, for example, that not many of my friends in vocational ministry waited until they were thirty to get started (Lk 3:23). And to my knowledge, none of them began their ministry with forty days in the wilderness (Lk 4:1-2). The Spirit’s leading of Jesus was unhurried. What happened during that wilderness stay? Jesus fasted and he faced temptations orchestrated by the devil. It strikes me that the essence of these temptations was to provoke Jesus to hurry to get for himself what the Father had promised to provide, but in his good timing. I’ll talk more about this in chapter four, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that a God for whom a day is as a thousand years (2 Pet 3:8) relates to time quite differently than we do!
I believe that modeling our life according to the unhurried pace of Jesus’ life and ministry could be a healing and empowering vision for contemporary Christians. Yet many of us measure our faithfulness to God by how many tasks we get done for him or how many meetings we attend to plan his kingdom work. As glad as he is for our service, I believe he is even more pleased when we give him our attention and our friendship.
It seems fitting that I wrote an early draft of this introductory chapter in a quiet room at a retreat center. The setting was idyllic. My window looked out on a long stretch of lawn with trees that seemed to reach up to the heavens in praise. My cell phone coverage dropped out, which I once would have considered a liability but now consider a definite plus. That quiet, unhurried environment exposed my internal struggle with hurry. I feel hurried inside even when nothing actually urgent is on my schedule. Hurry has become a habit: I find myself stuck in emergency mode. Even when nothing outward is pressuring me to pick up the pace, I feel an internal impulse to get to some ill-defined “next thing” that needs my attention. It’s pathological. I need healing. I need grace. I need to learn from Jesus himself how to live at his unhurried pace.
The Spirit of God has been working in my heart to teach me how to move at the pace of grace rather than at my own hurried, self-driven pace. I have also realized that an unhurried life is not a lazy life. In fact, it can be the exact opposite.
HOW WE GOT THIS HURRIED
There are a number of reasons why I’m hurried. Maybe some of these same things fuel your hurriedness. First, I’ve learned, and perhaps I’ve even been trained, that the faster I go, the more things I get done. There’s some truth to that, of course. But I wonder if all those things I’m getting done matter as much to God—or even to me—as I assume they do. I may be getting more tasks done at a faster pace, but my sense of why I’m doing them has faded. I’m also aware that God’s great commandment to us isn’t “Get more things done,” but to love him with the whole of our energies, capacities and passions and to extend that love to others. And love isn’t rushed. The first trait Paul mentioned when he described love in that famous chapter of his is patient (see 1 Cor 13). Patience is an unhurried virtue, and it’s one of the virtues we have the hardest time with. In my preoccupation with efficiency, I miss much that God wants to do in my life and say to me in the moment. Hurry rushes toward the destination and fails to enjoy the journey.
Adding to the addiction to speed are cultural assumptions about hurry that are built into our mindset. We have a bias toward hurry. Ours is a culture that values speed, efficiency and quickness. Waiting is bad. Getting what we want now is good. Period. We don’t stop to ask if what we’re getting is even what we most deeply desire. Hurry is a way of life in which advertisers have been mentoring us for years!
This bent toward speed is supported by our very language. Just take a minute to look up the word slow in your dictionary. Notice how many of the definitions are negative in tone. My Microsoft Word dictionary offers the following as the first three meanings for the adjective slow: “sluggish,” “time-consuming” and “stupid.” Merriam-Webster offers more than a dozen definitions of slow. Half are negative, and half are neutral; only one feels positive: “not hasty.” The definitions offered for fast are far more positive in tone.
Now consider the connection between hurry and boredom. Do you realize that boredom is a modern phenomenon? It’s a way of describing how the empty spaces between our hurried activities feel to us. I grew up in a semirural suburb of Sacramento, California, in the 1960s, and what my kids call boring today was the normal pace of my life. Video games, DVDs, cell phones and the like had not become ever-present. We had just three network channels, one PBS channel and one or two local channels on our small TV. Cartoons were a Saturday morning treat; they weren’t available 24/7.
Being unhurried doesn’t mean being lazy, uninvolved, casual or careless. Those four words expose our culture’s false thinking: “Hurry is efficient. Hurry is productive. Hurry is evidence of my importance.” Consider the answer we get when we ask, “How are you?” More often than not, the response is “Busy.” Although the word is often said with exasperation or resignation, I think just under the surface we believe that we’d be judged as substandard if we ever said, “I have just enough to do,” or “These days my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” We assume that others will admire our busy and (implied) successful lives. Yet I’m less and less impressed with the outcome of a hurried life. In the long run, does hurry really lead to a fruitful life?
TECHNOLOGY AND SPEED
Since the 1960s and 1970s, our hurry has also been fueled, ironically, by technologies that promise to increase leisure time and give us a much more unhurried existence. Instead, technology has accelerated our pace of life, making our days fuller and giving us much less downtime. We now have the ability to fit more and more tasks into a given amount of time. We have technology to fill every minute with more and more work and activity. We fail to realize how weary and distracted this filled-to-the-brim life makes us. We can get more things done than ever before, but few people would argue that this has made life more meaningful. In fact, a whole new science has emerged that addresses time pathologies. There is time pressure. Time urgency. Most severe is hurry sickness.4
Now I don’t want to imply that hurry is only a contemporary issue. Percy Ainsworth, a pastor from the 1800s, said:
This busy world will surge about you with the tread of restless feet and the throb of restless hearts. And little that you will do will seem to make a pause in the rush of things. But you may in Christ find rest for your soul. You will rest in your work, knowing that duty is eternal; rest in your service of others, knowing that sacrifice is eternal; rest in your purest earthly communion, knowing that love is eternal. This is the hasteless life, and those that “believeth in Christ” will live it.5
Where Ainsworth says hasteless, I want to suggest unhurried. The unhurried life Ainsworth described is what I want. Like me, he longed for a life with rest rather than rush, and he died in 1909! Hurry was just as much a reality one hundred years ago as it is today. We now have technology, though, that enables us to hurry at greater and greater speeds. We can drive five hundred miles or fly five thousand miles today in the same amount of time someone a hundred years ago would have traveled just twenty miles. No wonder hurry is a big issue for us. Our technological tools translate our inward hurry into outward hurry.
I’m not ungrateful for the gift of speed as it relates to technology and transportation. I don’t want to access the Internet at dial-up modem speed. I don’t want to ride a horse and buggy five hundred miles to visit my extended family. And I’m grateful for a plane that enables me to leave for and arrive in another part of the world on the same day as opposed to weeks- and months-long train trips or ocean voyages.
WANG MINGDAO: WALKING WITH GOD WITHOUT HURRY
In his book Faith That Endures, Ronald Boyd-MacMillan tells the story of a number of conversations he has had with Wang Mingdao, one of China’s most famous church pastors of the last century.6 The first time he met this famous—and persecuted—Chinese pastor, they had the following interchange: “‘Young man, how do you walk with God?’ I listed off a set of disciplines such as Bible study and prayer, to which he mischievously retorted, ‘Wrong answer. To walk with God you must go at walking pace.’”7
The words of Wang Mingdao touched me to the core. How can I talk about the Christian life as walking with God when I so often live it at a sprint? Of course we “run with perseverance the race marked out for us,” but we may fail to run with “our eyes [fixed] on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith” (Heb 12:1-2). Jesus is inviting me to walk with him. Too often, I find myself running for him. There’s a difference!
On another visit, Boyd-MacMillan asked Wang Mingdao about his twenty-year imprisonment for proclaiming Jesus in China. That cell became a place of unchosen unhurried time for Mingdao. There was nothing to do but to be in God’s presence, which he discovered was actually everything. Boyd-MacMillan summarizes what he learned from Wang Mingdao:
One of the keys to the faith of the suffering church: God does things slowly. He works with the heart. We are too quick. We have so much to do—so much in fact we never really commune with God as he intended when he created Eden, the perfect fellowship garden. For Wang Mingdao, persecution, or the cell in which he found himself, was the place where he returned to “walking pace,” slowing down, stilling himself enough to commune properly with God.8
CLASSIC WISDOM FOR UNHURRIED LIVING
What counsel do I find in the Scriptures and Christian writings from centuries past for living a more unhurried life?
Psalm 46:10 offers us this unhurried invitation: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Relax and remember who is in charge here.9 Vincent de Paul, a seventeenth-century French priest dedicated to serving the poor, said, “[The one] who hurries delays the things of God.” My usual pace of life reflects a different belief: “The one who hurries gets more done for God.” Vincent claimed, however, that the person who hurries ahead in the things of God actually falls behind. But somehow we believe that hurry will hasten the things of God. What if Abraham hadn’t rushed to help God keep his promise by having a child with Hagar (Gen 16)? Abraham’s hurry caused serious delay of the things of God.
Proverbs 19:2 says, “Desire without knowledge is not good—how much more will hasty feet miss the way!” Here one of the costs of hurry is exposed. We feel the temptation some drivers feel: “I don’t know where I am. What should I do? I know! I’ll drive faster!” Hurrying like that puts us at risk of running past God’s way for us. We somehow think that rushing about will put us on a fruitful path to God, but the opposite is usually true. Taking the unhurried way enables us to be attentive to God’s presence and guidance. I want to learn to live at that pace of grace. No slower and definitely not any faster.
Author and pastor Wayne Muller tells the story of a South American tribe who would march for long periods and then abruptly sit and rest. When questioned about this pattern, they said “they needed the time of rest so that their souls could catch up with them.”10 Maybe being bored at times is a gift, an opportunity for those of us who go so fast we may be leaving our souls behind.
In his classic Your God Is Too Small, J. B. Phillips tells us that God is “never in a hurry.”11 Never in a hurry. How might a deeper awareness of God’s gracious pacing transform our way of life and work? What would happen among us if we were to take on his unhurried manner? What might such a life look like? These are the questions I am bringing to these pages.
AN UNHURRIED JOURNEY WITH JESUS
I have come to appreciate the gifts of following an unhurried Savior. For example, I’ve found that a more unhurried inner pace decompresses my false sense of drivenness. I’ve also learned that “making things happen” isn’t as helpful as learning to respond with courage to whatever God is doing. He makes things happen, and I would be wise to choose to work with him. My hurry is what often makes the yoke of life and ministry heavier than Jesus means it to be.
I find that when I am most hurried, I run past much that God is trying to show me, give me, lead me into. Hurry becomes my automatic-pilot modus operandi rather than a way to thrive in this life. I’m learning, as I watch Jesus’ unhurried way, that keeping in step with him, living with him at a walking pace, is a way to sink into and enjoy the abundant life in him that he wants me to know.
So the question I would pose is this: If we are followers of an unhurried Savior, what should our pace of life look like? Since, for example, Jesus often stepped away from the needs of people to be alone with his Father in unhurried communion, might we, his followers, do well to learn to do the same? Being attentive to Jesus’ life and learning from him can shape our vision of what the pace of grace will look like in our day-to-day lives. In some ways, living a Jesus-modeled, grace-paced life gets at the essence of spiritual leadership. I like to describe spiritual leadership as living a grace-paced life in the midst of a driven culture; living at a vital, life-giving, peaceful pace while remaining engaged and active in the kingdom work Jesus began here on this earth. I live not at the mercy of the culture’s pace, but blessed by the mercy of my unhurried Savior.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
In this book, we will take a closer look at the idea that Jesus is an unhurried Savior. Chapter two looks at Jesus’ unhurried way of developing apprentices. He sought to cultivate in his first followers an attentiveness to the Father that would enable them to influence people for Jesus far beyond their hopes or dreams. As I share my story of ministry leadership in a church setting, I want to offer insights you’ll find helpful in the places of spiritual influence Jesus has entrusted to you as a parent, spiritual director, volunteer in your church or ministry leader. Next, chapter three looks at productivity and laziness and proposes that a more unhurried way of life is more productive than our often frantic and driven way. I also talk about acedia, a classic counterfeit to holy unhurry. Jesus’ unhurried response to the temptations he faced in the wilderness will teach us how unhurry can protect us from impulsive actions that are less than life-giving (chapter four). A careful reading of Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan will illustrate that being unhurried frees us to show compassion to the person right in front of us who is in need (chapter five). Chapter six explores Jesus’ unhurried rhythm of prayer and ministry. He who often withdrew to lonely places to spend time in communion with the Father (Lk 5:16) encourages us to do the same: Jesus invites us to follow him in the rhythm of life he models for us.
In chapters seven through eleven, we will explore various facets of the unhurried way of life that Jesus invites us to share with him. Chapter seven talks about one of God’s first gifts: during creation, he established the Sabbath, a day of rest. God later commanded his people to keep the Sabbath, a command Jesus fulfilled rather than abolished. In chapter eight, I share some of my experiences with suffering, an unwelcome reality in this fallen world that slows us down. In fact, nothing seems to slow our lives down quite as much as hardship or pain.
Chapter nine addresses Christian maturity, exposing the immaturity of our impulsivity and knee-jerk reactions. Maturity, however, does not happen overnight; it is, by nature, slow. Chapter ten offers some practical spiritual practices that can help us both cultivate a greater attentiveness to the presence of God in our lives and enjoy a simpler, richer walk with him. Finally, chapter eleven focuses on the ultimate in unhurried time—eternal life. How would our pace of life be affected if we fully realized that, as followers of Christ, we are living eternal life now? Since eternal life isn’t just a dim future promise but a vital present reality, what could be different about how we live our moments and our days?
At the close of each chapter, in hopes of helping you enjoy the gift of an unhurried life, I will provide a few reflection questions that I call “Unhurried Time.” In the spirit of our theme, I hope you’ll take time to reflect on one of them before moving along to the next chapter. If you are reading this book in a group, you can also use these questions to reflect together. From experience, I can share that it is in experimenting and practicing that I’ve learned to welcome the grace of a less hurried heart, mind and manner.
Let me close with a prayer for us as we begin our journey toward unhurriedness: Father, thank you for giving us, in your Son, an example of a grace-paced life. You know how much in bondage to the hurriedness of our culture we can feel. We want to live at the pace Jesus lived, but we are such slow learners. So please give us ears that hear you, hearts that are attentive to you and minds that are quiet before you so that we can learn from you. Living an unhurried way of life seems impossible, but, Almighty God, nothing is impossible for you. Amen.
UNHURRIED TIME
1. Think again about our cultural tendency to value a fast orientation and devalue a slow one. In what ways do you see this tendency in your own life? What voices, within or without, seek to keep you hurried? Why not take a few minutes to imagine in prayer how a more unhurried way might actually be a more fruitful one?
2.How do you respond to the idea of Jesus as relaxed? What is your initial reaction? Is it positive or negative? What changes would you like to see in your perspective here? Why not take a few moments to talk with Jesus about this?
3. In addition to some of the illustrations of Jesus’ unhurried way that I’ve shared in this chapter, what others come to mind? What do these stories say about how you might be following Jesus in his way?
AN UNHURRIED APPRENTICE
When it comes to following Jesus and inviting others to join us on the journey, I hit a turning point in my life and ministry about twenty years ago. Up until that point, my ministry had been more about gathering a crowd than about cultivating a core of committed people and following Jesus together with them. My style of ministry was hurried and frantic. My goal was to fill the calendar with more events so I could fill the seats with more people. I would never have said it that bluntly, but it would have been hard for an objective observer to come to a different conclusion. I felt satisfied and important when the number of college students coming to our meetings was growing. I felt frustrated and worthless when that number decreased or even stayed the same. In conversations among our church staff at the time, we would say, “We count people because people count.” I don’t think that kind of math made anyone but us feel important, though.
At the beginning of that new season, when I was serving as a college pastor in a large church, I was introduced to the practice of spending extended time alone with God in silence, solitude and listening prayer. I had read many spiritual formation books affirming the value of such practices. I very much liked what they said, but I hadn’t actually tried practicing those disciplines myself. I didn’t quite know how to get there from where I found myself in my busy life and ministry. (Over the last twenty years, I have come across many who testify to having a similar experience.) This unhurried practice of extended time alone with God would, however, become essential to my growth as a follower of Jesus.
That day, the “extended time” was only seventy-five minutes. That was about all the leader of the retreat, Wayne Anderson, thought we seminarians could handle—and Wayne was probably right. A number of things happened in those minutes—and most of them in the last ten or fifteen. I spent the first hour feeling itchy and noisy inside. I found myself frustrated that God wasn’t doing something or saying something to me. I expected, I suppose, some sort of burning bush, heavenly vision or inner voice—and I expected it in a hurry! What I experienced, however, was silence and solitude. To be fair, that was the advertised aim of the retreat day.
The main thing I remember about the time was that God brought to my mind a specific area of struggle—lust—that I needed to confess to my friend Chris, who was with me at the retreat. When that idea first crossed my mind during the time of solitude, I dismissed it. For one thing, I didn’t want to be vulnerable in that way to anyone. For another, Chris was my college intern, and I didn’t want him to see “Pastor Alan” in such a poor light. But I had told God at the beginning of the time that if there was anything I sensed him saying to me, I would write it down and take action on it.
So, on the hour-long drive home, I wrestled inside about admitting my struggle to Chris. We were at least halfway home when I began to tell him my story. It took a while. When I finished, he was silent. I began to think, Oh no. What have I done? How will Chris ever trust me or respect me as his pastor? Then, after a bit, Chris expressed appreciation for what I had shared and even began to talk about some places of need in his own life. That became a new place of growth in our journey as followers of Jesus. His grace began to touch these exposed places in our lives in vital and transformative ways that we hadn’t experienced in our very busy schedules of ministry planning and activities.
A couple of days later, on Sunday afternoon, it was time for my weekly two-hour meeting with the college ministry team leaders. After talking through some details about a few upcoming events, I challenged these leaders to scatter around the church property and spend fifteen minutes alone and quiet with God, just listening to him. They were surprised by the assignment but, thankfully, willing.
This being a very new practice for me, I noticed as I wandered the church grounds that my mind didn’t want to slow down. I was distracted by many things, and my mind kept wandering off—running off—in various directions. After a while, God seemed to bring the thought, Slow down the pace. I realized that my life and my work had been a kind of constant rush hour. I drove fast, walked fast, worked fast. Jesus was inviting me to slow down the pace of everything I did.
When I found myself slowing down inside, the Lord seemed to say, “Don’t talk trust and live worry.” As a pastor, I often recommended truths that I was not practicing. Anxiety drove a lot of what I said and did. (Sometimes it still does.) And Jesus was inviting me to live with trust in him instead of worry.
As I walked back to my office to meet with the student leaders, God seemed to say, “Don’t do homework tonight. Date your wife.” I was behind on my seminary coursework, but my wife, Gem, had been gone for the whole weekend. I decided to listen to God, so later that evening, I shared with her more about my Friday encounter with Jesus. The seminary assignment eventually got done, but so much that was more important happened in this intimate conversation with my partner in life and ministry.
GOD SHOWS UP
After the group of leaders had reassembled, we shared with one another what we had experienced in our fifteen minutes alone and quiet with God. Brian, whom I had told about my Friday retreat, said that he had set aside some time on Saturday to be alone and quiet with the Lord. During that time an image came to his mind a couple of times, but he had disregarded it. Now, during this fifteen minutes of silence with the Lord on Sunday, the same image came up. It was the image of a balloon with a slow leak. As the balloon inevitably ran out of air, Brian was pumping it back up, over and over again. That picture helped him realize that he was living life in his own strength, pumping himself up for ministry, school and life. God was speaking to Brian about his need to find sustaining strength in God, rather than relying on his own strength that was so quickly depleted.
Other students talked about their fifteen minutes with God. Although I don’t remember the specifics, I remember being overwhelmed by the power and reality of what each student experienced during the time. Fifteen minutes together planning a program or solving a problem would have been so much less significant than those fifteen unhurried minutes spent listening for God. And that listening would bear a great deal of fruit. It would change our understanding of the Christian life to a “following Jesus together” life.
The practices of solitude, silence and listening to God started to slow me down and enabled me to focus my attention more and more on coming to Jesus and following him rather than talking about Jesus and slaving away for him. In that context and over time, ministry became a matter of simply inviting students to join me in this journey. We were learning to follow Jesus together. The focus was less and less on our activities for him and more on our attentiveness to him, on walking with him, and on working with him. We were learning together how to follow him—and it was one of the hardest years of my life and ministry. In many ways, my previous focus on planning more events and giving more talks was easier. Staying busy seemed easier than becoming unhurried, at least at the time. And it was a lot less messy.
One of the transitions we made in our college ministry that year was that my wife, Gem, and I began to focus our attention on a small group of student leaders. About a dozen of them—young men and women who, like me, had been very hurried in planning all of the events and meetings and trips for our college ministry—joined us in seeking Christ together in the context of our leadership gatherings. Often we would take thirty minutes of a two-hour meeting to go our separate ways and simply be alone with God. Depending on where we were meeting, we would walk the church property or around our neighborhood. We’d either listen to what God was saying to us personally through a passage of Scripture or just wait on God together in a heart posture of attentive listening. I wanted to assume that the students could do this on their own time, but we discovered that our way of life and ministry up until then made that unlikely. We needed to learn together how to live this “Come to me, come follow me” way of life.
When we began to focus on Christ like this during our leadership gatherings, when we listened for what God had to say to us and prayed for the larger community of students we served, we realized that being unhurried before God was a messy proposition. Personal struggles surfaced. Conflicts arose. It may sound strange, but we weren’t accustomed to being that involved in one another’s lives. We were used to staying busy with the work, but that year it wasn’t uncommon for us to spend a large portion of these weekly meetings addressing those personal struggles and interpersonal issues. Sometimes two or three smaller meetings would be occurring as small groups of students hashed out their hurts and sins. Sometimes a few students would gather around to pray for another who had confessed a particular struggle that had been, until then, hidden by the busyness of doing ministry.
