While doing some reading, I stumbled across this from J. I. Packer: “Live slowly enough to be able to think deeply about God.” It’s been some time since a statement hit me so hard. A myriad of health issues in my family have sent my life spinning like a top on steroids for the past year. Add keeping a small business afloat and the usual responsibilities of life, and there’s been little margin in my world for quite some time.
I’m sure you can relate; we all go through these seasons. In the middle of these times, it’s easy to get lost as the competing urgency of so many things obscures your priorities. Life is speeding by and it’s all you can do to just hold on. We need to remember how important it is to slow down and seek God.
I enjoy reading through the Bible every year and have done this long enough to recognize it’s easy to read with the goal of checking a box rather than to drink deep of the riches in His Word. It happens when we don’t prioritize reading the Word above all else and then scramble to fit it into our day. It happens when we have so many other things on our mind that we aren’t focusing on what we read. Both result from living life too fast. It’s important to live slowly because we’re not going to get a second chance to get this life right.
Life seems to be on an endless cycle of speeding up. Everything moves at a much quicker pace than when I was growing up, a pace that was already much faster than what my parents grew up experiencing. The speed never goes backward, it only races ahead. If we aren’t careful, the craziness of our culture will sweep us away. The only way to stop it is to be intentional about slowing down. Keep your focus on the Lord and discard almost everything else coming your way.
If Jesus is the most important thing to you, then you must strip away everything that is not of Him. Life will throw plenty of unexpected and unwanted events into your path. It’s part of our fallen human experience. Knowing we’re going to deal with those circumstances, it’s important we don’t clutter our lives with any more things that don’t glorify God. There are only twenty-four hours in each day and if we fill it with things that are not of Christ, I promise you He will get squeezed out. We profess Him as Lord, but we live as if we love this world more than we do anything else.
If you feel life has been crowding out your time with God, you must make a conscious effort to scale back and live slowly. Do it now. A cluttered life is like a cancer that will eat away at your soul. As spiritual beings, we need Jesus to survive and thrive. Make the knowledge of Him the most important thing in your life. Get rid of anything that is keeping you from a deep study of His Word. Read the Psalms and notice how amazed they were with the beauty and character of God. That’s what we want. We want God to so consume us that nothing else matters. Get rid of the excess activities that are crowding out Christ. Tune out the noise. Live slowly and marinate in the beauty and wonder of our Great Savior Jesus.