The Slower Pace

I have always remembered that day at a Retreat Center when the retreat leader directed us to rise from our chairs and follow him in a line around the room.  My first thoughts were that we were walking too slow.  I kept thinking about stepping on the heel of the guy in front of me.  And, then we were going nowhere but back to the place from which we started.  It was like slow motion and my mind was going at its usual much faster pace.  I was a slow learner.  It took me a long time to understand what he was saying without speaking a word to us.    

I did then, and still do, struggle with the pace of living.  What I have learned about myself is that it is easy to allow the things around me and the people who are a part of those surroundings to dictate the pace at which I live.  Of course, to speak of the pace of life is more than just talking about walking slow or fast, instead, it is about an attitude that we allow to grow within us.  Living too fast is about missing out on what God has put in our present; yet, still we hurry on toward whatever it is that beckons us.    

There has been something liberating about living midst the creation and realizing that the creation is not on fast time, but slow time.  Some baby chicks came to the farm back in the Spring.  Now they are young chickens, but it will be a couple of more months before they start doing what they were brought here to do.  Lay eggs.  Like that retreat leader of long ago, creation moves slowly.  I am slowly learning that I am better served when I live in sync with the created order in which God has placed me.