EVEN MORE SLOWLY
We need to face our culture squarely. We need to ask where we find wisdom and encouragement to select and balance our time commitments. To realize the peer pressure for children and adults to live less busily and more quietly is to realize being radically different to social norms and cultural messages.
To go more slowly and find new values in a life less filled with noise, speed, and nanosecond stimulus is a major challenge for everyone. It will appear we are going backward, hiding from reality, and to have our heads in the sand to even think such thoughts. But the other thing to consider is the fruit that has been produced in us and our children after a generation or two of extreme busyness, multiple scheduling, all meals out and on the run, fast food and fast service, stress to time constraints, and with little attention to promoting, protecting and producing the diminishing skills of conversation, inquiry, softness, quietness, and peace. Peace cannot live in high-speed busyness. They are opposites.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Jesus