How to Slow Down 101 for Quick Learners and Multitaskers
I’m better at learning things fast—as if beginner to expert overnight is a goal worth pursuing.
I’m the sort of rookie who can Google Excel formulas until something I barely understand calculates the correct data–then teach the formula to others in the office. The sort of girl who pulls four consecutive all-nighters applying last-minute for grad school because I envisioned foreign missions instead. Who also registers to walk a marathon then the next day tests to see how far I can already go—which apparently was five miles and some speed shy of my end goal.
Tight timelines and what I don’t know yet rarely intimidate me because I enjoy the challenge. Maybe you’re the same way.
- You list “quick learner” and “multitasker” at the top of your resume.
- You power walk and speed read—yes, sometimes at the same time.
- You don’t know how to get a B.
- You think you’ve got to outperform your own best work.
- You don’t sit down for long, even to eat.
- You refuse to let anyone down if working more furiously will erase the possibility.
There is work ethic to acquire and character to mold by doing hard things well but also fast. True. Challenge chisels us and grows our resilience.
But here’s what I’m also discovering: The things that take grueling-slow learning and moment-by-moment surrender, those are the harder lessons to learn. The ones most worth learning.
A Slew of Slow-Grown Lessons
Sometimes speed isn’t the right choice. Many times making it end sooner isn’t best. Truth is, delayed answers can be drenched in grace. Tender conversations with Jesus happen when we pause. When we pray gut-honest prayers. When we feel hungry instead of numb.
It’s the complicated questions that lengthen the conversation:
Why would You say go, then close the door?
Why haven’t You rescued, restored, or redeemed yet?
Where is the good in Your plan?
Today, by grace, I can stand in the middle of ampersands and still-being-redeemed and say that God’s with-ness is more than enough evidence of the goodness of His heart. But I didn’t get here overnight. It was a slew of slow-grown lessons that deeply taught me to trust the consistency of Jesus’s nature.
Slowing the Pace
Perhaps the lesson I learn most slowly is to simply slow down. To taste my food and be the last to let go of a hug. To exhale and let my best be enough. To care more that I’m obedient to the God-nudges than what He makes of them. To embrace restorative rest.
If you relate to my struggle to slow the pace, you likely already have the book Growing Slow on your bookshelf. This was a timely read for me, in between a project where I racked up a summer full of late nights and one I was worried would go the same way.
“It’s time to embrace a different story about everything you’re growing,” urges Jennifer Dukes Lee. “It’s time to have faith to believe what your eyes cannot see. The most beautiful things in this grand old world began as seeds that waited in the dark.”
Waiting. We resist it as if some sort of settling. But there’s a raw-real surrender you walk out in seasons of waiting that have no neat timeline, no foreseeable end.
Starting with Stillness
For all my impulse to rush and perfect regardless of the pace, the time of day I like the best is the stillness of early morning. It’s an invitation before the sun wakes the rest of the world to steep in gratitude, stir awe, mull on God’s word, and offer my worship.
Here, facedown on the floor with a song on repeat in my Beats, time seems irrelevant and God’s voice more clear. I bring my misplaced beliefs, assumptions rooted in unworth, and wrestlings over how He’s actually good in all things–and He meets me, every time, with tender compassion and undeserved kindness. God’s patient and present, and I’m learning His plan is far more about what He’s growing inside me than what I can achieve or produce.
Although I’m still learning to slow down the rest of the day, beginning my day embracing the slow, soul-searing work of surrender to the Holy Spirit affects my mood, my work, and my gratitude.
Stilling My Heart with Gratitude
Besides time on my knees, what stills my heart daily? Slows my can-do? Collides with my bent to perfect and constantly self-critique?
Penning lines in a gratitude journal.
Naming gifts in disguise, missed for being mundane.
Noting the promises and peeks into God’s nature in His Word.
I like my gratitude list to focus on what’s always true of God. Naming my thanks before it’s over–before God answers, intervenes, or redeems–reminds me of His constancy even when it doesn’t make sense in the present tense.
When funerals are planned in place of baby showers or one friend is healed while another is still waiting or God stacks the impossible in your way and says to step forward anyways–these moments can either make God seem cold and distant, or up close and personal. Gratitude, I’m finding, changes the equation.
As Ann Voskamp writes in Gift & Gratitudes,
Somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. Seeing the world with Jesus’ eyes, there’s this unexpected opportunity to daily love the complicated unlovely into loveliness.
From the vantage point of my knees and through now thousands of lines of thanks stretching across journals, I’ll say I too have witnessed the grace-lens of gratitude. How it turns my attention heaven-ward and slows the hurry in my steps. How it feels like joy and rest and a taste of God’s goodness even before anything changes.
Invitation to Slow through the #RefectJesus Challenge
My default is to learn and finish everything fast, but it’s in the slow that my heart is made whole. Lingering on my knees and in the Word, writing my thanks list, and leaning into honest conversation with Jesus as He unearths lies I’ve internalized and reminds me of who I really am to Him–these are practices that heal.
If you need more slow in your life too, I invite you to cultivate gratitude the rest of this month through the #ReflectJesus challenge. We’re tagging our friends who reflect various aspects of Jesus’ nature over on Instagram and Facebook. As we thank and pray for our friends, we get a pause to consider what it means for us that Jesus is consistent in these ways. I’m also sending a short prayer every day of the challenge to help you mirror Jesus too. Grab the challenge prompts and prayers below!
As we close, here’s what I’m praying for you today:
Jesus, You’re so near, even when we’re too busy to notice. Help us embrace the slow pace of deep lessons and intimate conversation with You. Unwind us on the inside. May we inhale grace and exhale gratitude.
Just a friend over here in your corner,
P.S. Prefer the audio? Subscribe to The Uncommon Normal podcast for the same weekly content!
