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As you journey your way through life are you finding you have less time in your days? Do you ever feel like the days are just zooming by? Do you recall the last time you truly unplugged and recharged?

As a pastor who cares deeply about the spiritual health in our faith community, I am greatly concerned about the unsustainable pace of people's lives that I witness all too often. Dallas Willard, was an American theologian who spent most of his life exploring Christian spiritual formation. He said that all of us must “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.”

In our culture when we want more out of life, we tend to do more, work harder, move faster. God invites us to a different way. We are invited to explore a practice of our faith that brings our heart to a slow enough pace that we become mindful of God's activity.

Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese Protestant theologian wrote “Love has its speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.”

I wonder how many of us are moving through our lives much faster than three miles an hour? We've mistakenly believed that we somehow just need to press on and keep running ahead. We have lived as though the God experience we long for lies just around the next corner. But Koyama is suggesting that God moves at a slowing pace.

We are designed to live a life that is slowed on the Sabbath. As people of faith, we need to learn together that it is only in our slowing that we will ever catch up with God.

Are you regularly slowing your speed to God's pace? I'm not talking about taking a day off so you can fill it up with a different kind of activity. I mean where are you finding a regular pattern of returning your life to three miles an hour?

I've been developing my own practice of Sabbath over the past 12 years, sometimes successfully, often unsuccessfully, but I am experienced enough to assure you of one thing : slowing will not happen in a way that conveniently fits your schedule. If you're anything like me, your schedule is always a day or two short of what's required to get things done. To hold space for slowing requires a willingness to be inconvenienced, to be potentially out of the loop on a few things, to be confronted with the notion that life will continue while you temporarily step of the treadmill.

I confess that I am not comfortable with any of the costs required to develop a practice of slowing and Sabbath. Still, I am learning to lean into these practices anyway, because they are helpful guides on the way to the life of faith I hope for.

It turns out that God moves at three miles an hour. Who am I to am to argue?

 

The above blogpost comes as an excerpt from Pastor Kyla's message on February 7, 2021.  

To dive further into the practices of faith that help sustain a slowing pace, consider joining us for our "Faith at 3mph" lenten series.