Slowly, Slowly

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
– Teilhard de Chardin

I think the reason I love being in the redwoods is that they make me feel engulfed. They rid me of the plague of self-centeredness in which I constantly live. It is impossible to be amid these silent giants and not feel yourself small, not realize that the world has gone on long before you, will go on long after you, and that what you have right now is the moment. It is a moment that can never really be captured through a photograph or a painting, that cannot be translated in quite the same way into anything but the present experience.

And it is not a moment to be rushed. Every amazing thing about the trees—the way they talk to each other through their roots; their seed-sprung height; their resilience to fire and capacity for regrowth—every one of those things happens slowly. Come back the next day, and nothing looks different. Come back in a few years, and nothing looks different. They live in a different scale of time. And for a moment, I live in their world, not mine.

And what I’m able to see is that my world is rushed, for the simple reason that I am rarely in the moment. My mind is usually tracking a few hours or days ahead of my body. Even as I’m doing the current task, I’m calculating how much time I’ve got left for it. I’m resorting the list of what I have yet to do. I suppose it’s the natural product of this season of life—four kids phasing into the teen years with active social and extracurricular calendars; two adults with careers and classes and our own social and ministry lives. Our calendar has gotten so complex that each day feels like a logistical puzzle to be solved.

But, the trees whisper to me: does it have to be like that? The problem with living a rushed life is that you begin to functionally value the kinds of things that can be documented and displayed: achievement, productivity, outcomes. You begin to live inside the kinds of things those values breed: anxiety, control, comparison and fear. Your life becomes consumed, until what you might really value fade into shadows, ghost values that hover in your mind but increasingly fade from your experience.

But the things I say I value—inner growth, thankfulness, joy, connection, witness—cannot be rushed. They cannot be contained in a calendar or list. They are less about an end-goal than the moment. Rather than anxiety and control, they demand attention and openness.

So I’m asking myself, what can I let go of, to release myself from a bondage to this pace of life? What good thing can I give up for the better, but less visible, thing I believe in?

God works in us slowly, like the trees. To think I can control his work, to think I can rush it or predict it, is as ludicrous as thinking I could change anything about these behemoths rising around me out of the mist and rain. They simple are: and I simply sit under them.