Ready and Slow

Living in a little farm city for 7 years has me understanding from ‘the outside’ what farm life is actually like. I have farmers who have become dear friends and sometimes when I think about the life of faith and unknowns that they live in I just want to sit and learn from them. It has not been an easy year of harvest (at least here in Manitoba). Many farmer's families, faith and mental capacities have been wearied and tested. 

God bless the farmers! 

I have sat over the years in a few farmhouses and around their tables. I am excited to think of all the things on their physical piece of land and home that point to spiritual things. It  can be a ‘thin space’ where what happens in the everyday,  ordinary farm workings can speak to our experience of God and His dealings with us. I think maybe this is why I love the way Jesus used parables in teaching?! The physical and the spiritual meet and we know He is a real, Holy God!

As I talk with my farm friends I understand there to be a readiness and urgency to harvest. Everything else has to be put on hold when the harvest is ripe. There is a focus, a willingness to work at anytime for long hours for the sake of taking in a crop. This ready urgency has a fast, task -driven, result-oriented, work hard side to it all. It makes me tired just thinking about it all! :)

On the other hand there are times and seasons on the farm where things are slow. Seeds planted do not grow overnight! The trust in the hidden, ‘under the soil’ work is slow and long and cannot be measured. There is no tool that can make things grow faster or no trick that can perfect an ideal weather situation. The farmer waits and trusts his/her God to work in His way.

As someone who is cultivating a confident, slow, unhurried life of trust in her God, I also see room in God’s Kingdom for this ready, urgent, focused mission of ministry. There are times and space for both. One is not more important than the other, but both are needed to live in abundance and unity under our King.

I long to see in my own heart and in spaces where the people of God gather that yes we talk of urgency and also give space to those of us who understand the deep, slow, unhurried moves of God’s work. This kind of living —the slow unhurried life, my dear readers is not just privy to farmlands, but I have been in unexpected places —-even in busy, bustling cities where it seems urgency is not always elevated above this trust in God’s slow and steady work.

So if you feel the missional urgency of the times we live in and the Gospel we live for...work well, dear friend! He is coming soon!

...And I ask that you hold that together with an unhurried, trust that we are also called to a waiting on God and a reckoning that we are not mere machines who proclaim the Gospel but beloved ministers who partner with a Holy King in His work and in the world til He comes! I have friends that are faster at their work then I’ll ever be...and they take time and slow down and walk with me. I also speed up some days to work and walk with them. What wonder to be ready yet slow! 

Here’s a word piece that’s one of my favourites:

Patient Trust

"Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances

acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete."

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ 

Maranatha! I trust Him!