Since I wrote on pacing oneself on Tuesday and the potential disaster of moving too quickly, I’ve been thinking more on the point. I’m probably drawn to this right now because of my own discomfort with the insane speed we seem to be moving at these days. My truck is from 1998. I still wear some blue jeans that I had in the 1980s. The computer I am writing on right now is from 2007, an eternity in technology age, especially today. I determined some years ago that I felt that the modern technology and speed of life had long left me. Now in 2016, it moves so quickly as to bring discomfort to my gut and disquiet to my soul.
The soul. That’s an old idea that speed seems to have banished. We are all 1s and 0s, perhaps just walking-talking wetware for a super AI. The soul is something else entirely. My soul though has been in disquiet as we edge ever closer to the Great Crisis (unless the pattern fails…and all signals in 2016 are to the contrary that we will be spared).
So, I have been trying to be more and more quiet. I mentioned last post reading more about Tolkien and Lewis, and how they lived in a very different time than we. My hunger for knowing how to live led me Abraham Kuyper, which I told you about when I urged you to start eating around the dinner table together. Kuyper was a pastor in the Netherlands who ultimately started his own university (Free University) and own political party (Anti Revolutionary Party), becoming Prime Minister in 1901. In a wonderful introduction to Kuyper by Richard Mouw, Mouw writes about how Kuyper was willing to take the long view because of his confidence that “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry ‘Mine!’”
Mouw shares that a religious group somewhat similar to Kuyper, the Mennonites, have a concept for waiting, for soul rest, by saying “We are living in the time of God’s patience.” For Kuyper, then, we should be willing to also take the long view, working for the overall positive welfare of the larger society, knowing that in the end, God will prevail.
So, if my soul feels disquiet, perhaps I need to sit more quietly and wait further. Make the actions that I undertake slow and focused on the good for the society in which I live.
John Ortberg writes much the same thing, the willingness to wait patiently for the Lord to move, to quiet the soul in his wonderful book Soul Keeping. He shares how he faced a deep challenge in his personal life. He visited his mentor, Dallas Willard who counseled patience, silence, quiet. Willard told him that the situation would “be a test of your joyful confidence in God.”
Later, Ortberg shared about something that Willard, who was ill, had received written by a 19th century theologian, Frederick Faber. Faber wrote “In the spiritual life God chooses to try our patience first of all by His slowness. He is slow; we are swift and precipitate…There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God….[As we go along in life with God], when he slackens [His pace], slacken at once; and do not be slow only, but silent, very silent, for He is God.”
You may not be a Christian, so the thought about waiting on God or having your soul disquiet could seem odd, out of place in our time and our society. So it may be. And yet there I am…a soul disquieted, but finding the strength to be slow and silent, waiting and resting. You may actually be here too, but uncertain how to speak of the feeling….the rushing, the noise, the lack of foundation.
Let your soul find rest in the silence then, waiting. Waiting with joy. You are under no command to perform. You are under no command to race ahead. Instead, as we live in a time that demands more patience for the healing of our souls, wait with joy.