Yesterday I wrote that sometimes we have to choose a new path. Here’s one that we’ve all been offered before but that most of us have turned away from:

Slow Down!

Matthew Kelly in Life is Messy has a section called just that: Slow Down. It begins with the observation that he has been “Way over the speed limit of life.” I have written about this before. My friend and mentor, the late Skip Gray used to say:

Jesus had a 3-mile-per-hour ministry: he didn’t go jogging through Judea, sprinting through Samaria, or galloping through Galilee. He walked wherever he went.

Well-known author Dallas Willard said, “You must relentlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

I really like the way Matthew Kelly frames it:

But here’s the real problem with racing through life. If you think of life as a race, every step sidewards and backwards, every pause, will seem like it doesn’t belong, like a waste of time. 

Every step is part of life, and there is life in every step. Life isn’t a race. It’s a dance. Every step forward and every step back, stepping sidewards and twirling in circles, are all part of the dance we call life.  

Great dancers are never in a hurry. They relax into the rhythm, become one with their partners, and experience the exhilaration of the dance. When was the last time your life felt like that? – Matthew Kelly, Life is Messy, page 38

Eugene Peterson captures the same idea in his rendering of Ephesians 4 in The Message:

He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christians in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. (Ephesians 4.11 – 13, MSG, emphasis mine)