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DAY 3

SLOW DOWN

But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:40-42 NIV)

In his book The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg tells of a conversation with a spiritual mentor, in which he sought advice. After listening to John describe his job, lifestyle, current stresses, and so on, his mentor paused for a long while, then told him, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

John somewhat impatiently asked him what else was necessary—that sounded good, he thought, but certainly there were other things he should be doing. After another long pause, his mentor replied, “There is nothing else.”¹

What would it look like to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life”? Because that is the most important issue of the spiritual life. All of the spiritual practices in this book won’t help if your pace of life is unhealthy. This book will encourage you to slow down, to listen, to be mindful—which simply means to pay attention, to notice. As you go through this book, you’ll be asked to consider: Where have you seen God? What are you grateful for? What mistakes do you need to confess? The goal of each chapter is to help you experience the deep love of Jesus. Unfortunately, you cannot experience that love in a hurry.

Ortberg observes, “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”² So many of us want to grow spiritually, want to experience the love of Jesus. So we add spiritual disciplines to an already crammed life and can’t figure out why all we experience is exhaustion. Doing “lots” of disciplines will be counterproductive, making our lives more hectic and therefore less connected to Jesus.

You are embarking on a forty-day journey. Please—don’t hurry through it. In fact, today is a good day to assess the current level of hurry in your life.

This book will provide you practical instruction on how to practice a number of spiritual disciplines that believers have used for years to grow closer to God, to experience Jesus’ loving presence. But you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry first. You will have to seriously consider: What other things might I have to prune from my schedule in order to have time to engage in these life-giving disciplines? What busywork is keeping me “worried and distracted” and preventing me from sitting at Jesus’ feet to just listen?

Slowing does several things. It allows us to pay attention. When you’re driving in unfamiliar territory, trying to read street signs or recognize landmarks, you’ll find that driving faster doesn’t help. Finding your way often requires taking your time.

Hurried people are fueled by obligation—I have to go here; I have to do this. Moving more slowly allows you to get in touch with what your soul longs for—things you actually want. If you take your time, you will be better able to discern which of those desires are God-given and might even reflect his desire for your life. When we slow down, we reframe those obligations into opportunities because we can see God in them. We change our “have tos” to “get tos.”

Thomas Kelly wrote: “How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? By quiet, persistent practice in turning all of our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship and surrender, toward him who calls in the deeps of our souls.”³

If we are sprinting through life, cell phone in one hand, cappuccino in the other, we cannot “lay hold of that Life and power” that comes when we know we are deeply loved. We cannot experience the healing power of Jesus in our lives. Hurry injures us.

Because of our culture and its obsession with speed and multitasking, it may seem that slowing down, living mindfully, and connecting with Jesus might be almost impossible. That’s because in our own power it is impossible. But with God, all things are possible. He’s placed a longing for himself in our hearts—we must decide to slow down and notice, to pay attention to and follow that longing.

PRESENCE PRACTICE

We’re often so used to our crazed pace that we are blind to hurry’s injurious effects on our souls. In their curriculum An Ordinary Day with Jesus, John Ortberg and Ruth Haley Barton offer an inventory to assess the level of hurry in your life. In it, they ask participants to honestly assess how accurately statements like these describe their life:

“You notice underlying tension in close relationships.”

“You have a preoccupation with escaping.”

“You often feel frustrated because you are not getting things done.”

“You have lost a sense of gratitude and wonder about life.”

“You sometimes have a gnawing feeling that there has to be more to life than this.”⁴

Do phrases like this describe your life most of the time? These are indicators of a hurried life. Perhaps you are trying to do too much.

This may not seem like a spiritual question, but who does the laundry, cooking, shopping, and cleaning at your home? What if those tasks were shared by all who live in your household? Making my children do their own laundry dramatically improved my spiritual life because it slowed the pace of my life. What small changes could you make to slow down the pace of your life?

One way to begin to answer that question: write out your monthly schedule on a one-page calendar. What have you said yes to on a weekly, monthly, or daily basis? Begin to pray about which things you ought to prune from your life.

Check here when you have completed today’s Presence Practice.