Tag: slow

It Will Not Delay

It Will Not Delay

The wallpaper of my phone is a picture of a quote which says, “It will surely come, it will not delay.” Next to the plastic, rose-bespeckled skull on my desk at school is another quote which says, “The Lord is not slow about his promise.” I think I feel compelled to post these passages of Scripture around my life because I feel like I’m inclined to not believe them and I know that I must.

I find myself doing similar things in other situations, too. There is a massive paper I need to write (yet which I have done essentially nothing on) and I have a desire to write about the role of hope in suffering as a Christian. This is not because I feel particularly hopeful or because I view myself as a very good suffer-er. And yet there is an attraction to this tension between suffering and hope. Or, as another example, recently, I read the description of a fictional story and it repelled and annoyed me, sounding far too similar in some ways to my own life, and so I bought it.

I’m not sure I love the tension that life offers to me and yet there is something intriguing about it. At times I run from it, not wanting to parse the particular stresses and contradictions in life. Other times, I sprint towards it, wanting one strain of my heart to engage in a head-on collision with another. Or for the misconceptions or untruths I believe to smash brilliantly into the truth or clarity which they don’t want to encounter.

Perhaps it is simply reflected in how I feel about Advent. I love the time of anticipation, the preparations, the slow moving from darkness to light, the delayed gratification. However, I also feel the tension in the season and am quick to see how I also greatly dislike that same tension in my own life, when the end of the journey is not quite so clear-cut and the conclusion unknown. The season of Advent continually calls this tension to mind as we prepare both for Christmas (clearly marked out for December 25th) and the end of our lives (very unclear and uncertain for most of us). It is a delight and a sorrow, a thing of great pleasure and one of profound suffering. Yet it is a tension in which we all must live.

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Try, Try Again

Try, Try Again

One day, during the upheaval of school from home, I was helping my niece with her homework. While smart and a quick learner, she didn’t appreciate the corrections I was offering as I critiqued the direction of her 2s or her S. I encouraged her to try again, despite the initial frustration of getting it wrong.

As she was begrudgingly doing it again, I thought about how so much of a child’s life is learning how to do things. Naturally, that involves a lot of trial and error as they learn to walk, read, write, ride a bike, hit a softball, do a cartwheel, snap their fingers, and the list goes on and on. Children have to start so often from a place of humble acceptance of their inability to do something they want to do.

I think I could learn a lot from that disposition.

In my life, it is easy to stay safe and do the things I know how to do or think I can do well. When it comes to looking like a fool, I’ve never been much of a risk-taker. I much prefer to watch and see how others do it before attempting something on my own. Yet some things can only be learned by trying, failing, and trying again.

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I Had a Slow Childhood

I Had a Slow Childhood

School was called off for today before I even went to bed last night. It meant that my sister and I leisurely watched a movie and then talked for a while before curling up to fall asleep. This morning, the snow hadn’t started yet so I went out of the house for a couple of hours, returning as the snow began to lie thick on the roads. Ideally, though, I would have been still tucked away in my bed or perhaps snuggled on the couch with a cup of coffee as I turned through my latest book.

In high school, I was surprised when I heard that on snow days kids went to go hang out at the mall. For me, it was an unthinkable action. Why would I go out into the blustery weather when that was the exact reason I wasn’t at school? I also was gifted with a father who would have unquestionably smacked me with a hearty dose of common sense if I would have even asked to drive to town despite the weather. Being at home was actually what I wanted to do anyway. While I liked school, I didn’t mind a day of sleeping in and being home. The same still holds true as an adult.

I grew up slow.

By that, I mean, as I grew up, we moved slowly.

I look at the schedules my students have or the schedules of kids and it looks so different from my youth. In elementary school, I usually rode the bus home and I was there until the next day when I left for school. My mom made supper and we all ate together. Sometimes the older siblings were running off to practice or games, but we almost always ate supper around our dining room table.

My summers were quiet, too. Sometimes we explored the farm or watched too much TV or read book after book. But it was slow, with plenty of time and space for us to play in the hay loft or read through book lists with forty to fifty titles. It wasn’t perfection, although my memory tends to cast an overly rosy hue on the days of my childhood. However, it had the great beauty of not being rushed.

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Airport Intentionality

Airport Intentionality

I spent thirteen hours in an airport a little over one week ago on an unfulfilled quest to conquer “Winter Storm Grayson” for the sake of a friend.  During my hours of meandering around the airport and having my flights rescheduled time after time, I saw one person who seemed to be on a different schedule from the rest of the masses.  Although I only saw him for a minute, I couldn’t help but notice he was passing his time in a slower, more intentional way than others.

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Generally, I’m not that person who is clandestinely taking pictures of other people.  But something about him captured my attention very quickly.  He slowly walked the long corridor and stopped briefly in front of each picture, taking it in and considering it.  I understand the rush between flights and short layovers that prevent others from taking in their surroundings.  Yet it wasn’t as though it took him twenty minutes to look at the pictures.  He was in my line of sight for only a couple of minutes.   Continue reading “Airport Intentionality” →