By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us,to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.Luke 1:78-79
A few weeks ago I was helping my son get dressed, and it wasn't one of my finest moments as a father. One of his greatest abilities is to dilly-dally, and some days [he reminds me way too much of myself when he does so and] my patience doesn't hold up for long. About halfway through the process that was taking five times longer than I thought it should, I was getting such a sense of hurry to get on to the next thing that I gave in to it and was more harsh with him than I should have been.
Unfortunately, that's not a specific memory of one instance a few weeks ago, but a general memory of countless times. And they don't just take place when I help him get dressed. And it also happens with people besides him. Plus when I'm by myself... Really, there's no limit to the times when I've had that sense of needing to hurry to get on to the next thing. What happened a few weeks ago was that I noticed the sense of hurry and started to wonder where it was coming from.
There's no real reason for me to have it- I'm grateful to have one of the most un-hurried schedules of anyone I know. Seriously, I can compete with a good percentage of the geriatric population. Most of the time I'm not running late for anything, but the hurry is just a result of my desire to get on to the next thing instead of paying attention to what it is I'm doing at the moment. I realized how often I have that sense of wanting to get on to the next thing, not just when I'm helping my kids get dressed, but all of the time. Instead of paying attention to this thing, I've noticed an almost constant sense of wanting to get on to the next thing.
I was part of a good Apprentice Group discussion yesterday about hurry and how much of an enemy it is to living our lives well. It was based on a chapter from one of the Apprentice books, in which James Bryan Smith says:
Hurriedness is an inner attitude that is not necessarily caused by outer circumstances; boredom is one of its symptoms. The solution to the problem is counter-intuitive: being present where you are...
What's really happening is that we aren't paying attention; we aren't living in the present moment. And we do that because we think the present moment isn't interesting...
Hurry sickness is the number one spiritual illness of our day...
No wonder we have the attention span of a ferret on a triple cappuccino...
The average parent spends twice as long dealing with e-mail as playing with his or her children...
The most important aspects of our lives cannot be rushed. We cannot love, think, eat, laugh, or pray in a hurry...
In our spiritual life we cannot do anything important in a hurry...
God never calls us, as Richard Foster likes to say, "into a life of panting feverishness."...
Jesus lives his life in perfect rhythm, the proper tempo, at all times. He will not be rushed. He never does anything in haste...
Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life...
Hurry is not part of a well-lived life.
(The Good and Beautiful God, Chapter 9)
Thankfully, over the last couple of weeks, since I began this experiment, I've noticed the unnecessary hurry diminishing a bit. I've noticed myself more able to pay attention to this thing, rather than constantly wanting to get on to the next thing. And while I've certainly had too many times of attempting to pray in a hurry, the structure of this project fosters a deliberate, attentive, good kind of slowness in me. Pausing four times per day to pray with other people's words, and once per day praying without words and with my own words, these practices are helping me to pay attention to this thing rather than the endless cycle of only paying attention to the next thing.
I think, and I hope, that the end result of this after this year won't be that I move at a sloth's pace in everything, but rather that I'm simply able to pay more attention.
[This is the 5th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]