Impatient with Uncertainty?
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Most days we are in a hurry to get where we are going, so often impatient with the slow of learning, the needed kindness to ourselves. We want to arrive, not meander. The pace of the hare appeals to us more than the slow and steady of the tortoise in the popular Aesop’s fable of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” We crave the exhilaration of a crash-course pace. Perhaps this is why the uncertainty of quarantine life has been so awfully uncomfortable—the progress feels imperceptible. But there is something to be gleaned from the slow that the hustle can never touch.
We value goals—not just written, measurable goals, but achieved goals. We feel we win when we accomplish, when we push harder and faster and fly higher. Yet these past number of weeks have felt more like a holding pattern than a race course. Our goals have become less concrete and far less momentous. Five years goals are less relevant than five-hour or even five-minute goals. And we may find ourselves feeling a little lost, a little irrelevant ourselves.
So today I am thinking of you—the young mom struggling to keep the kids from fighting and the house from drowning in a million little toys. The furloughed single parent feeling overlooked and hopeless. The grandparent wishing for an actual squeeze from little arms and a closer-than-six-feet-away glimpse of sweet faces. The working-from-home parent desperately trying to maintain the same productivity level in the midst of chaos and crumbs and NTI questions.
When will this all be over, we wonder for the hundred time, yet wishing away the slowness doesn’t hurry time along any faster. Time continues inching slowly forward like a creaking, rusted wheel, rolling back the curtain on our impatience and pride, baring our souls. When the pace slows we feel exposed.
Our words fall in haste but we can now hear them more easily, plinking like out-of-tune piano notes in an empty room. We are impatient with the pace, impatient with our frustration with the pace, and we need more grace.
How does the Soul-Keeper know we need the quiet to hear where we are out of tune? The holding pattern to learn which goals are really important? The slowed pace to show us where we lack in patience? The need for an extra bit of grace to accept that we cannot journey towards wholeness without Him?
It’s OK to slow enough to breathe again, so we can feel His breath alighting our souls. It’s alright to unwind so He can realign us.
We have permission to go slow, to go counter to the impatient rush and grind.
All the things we want fast—check-marks on our to-do-lists, digits on our direct deposits, accomplishments to pad our resumes, yes, even godly character and a mission-immersed life at microwave-speed—could we hold them with open hands? Could we dare to believe that something far richer could be won in the places our patience must grow most extravagantly?
Because when we are weak,
I AM is our strength,
but we may need a slower pace to see it.
The making of the best things is rarely done overnight. The art that moves us, the tunes that connect us to heaven, and the inventions that change the world often have at the helm someone patient enough to not rush perfection. In the same vein, we need a long-view perspective to be mission-minded: we embrace the slow and patient work God is doing in us and the sometimes imperceptibility slow results of letting it ripple out beyond us to our families, neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, churches, friend circles, and social media spaces. A gift found in the forced slow is patient endurance.
Leslie Verner writes in Invited that “in most communities, the ones who makes a difference are not the ones who swoop in to save the day but the ones who stay” (45). Alexandra Kuykendall offers a similar sentiment in Loving Our Actual Neighbor: “Being those who feel the uncomfortable yet don’t leave is a great reputation for Jesus people to have” (108). Nonetheless, staying pushes against our grain, and like sandpaper, smooths our rough edges. Opportunities to practice patience help us look more like the One who is so ever patient with us.
So as we seek to live lives marked with mission in our homes, neighborhoods, and other spaces we frequent, let’s not hurry ourselves ahead of what God is not finished yet with. Let’s sit with Him here, with our ugly impatience and all, because only He can piece together beauty out of us when we’ve fallen to pieces. Only He can be good enough to go deeper when our flesh says we’ve had enough. Only He can pierce us with His gaze and heal us with His touch. Only He, only He, can teach impatient me a better way.
When I rush, I trust me to make it happen. I grow callous. Something inside dies in the hustle. Something is always missing when He is not present.
Today, I invite you to pause with me and take inventory of how we are doing.
Where are we restless and impatient?
Who ultimately are we trusting?
And where are we out of tune?
When our lives are playing a discordant tune, everything suffers because our lives are not fully isolated compartments. Likewise, when we grow more Christ-like in one area of our life, it effects other areas. For example, when we learn to wait on God’s timing in one situation, it becomes easier to trust Him in other situations. We practice a little patience and it grows.
I find perspective in 1 Corinthians 3:7, which in the TPT version reads, “This means the one who plants is not anybody special, nor the one who waters, for God is the one who brings the supernatural growth.” We are highly valued, but it’s not about us. We are faithful with our little because when we zoom out we see the bigger picture. This applies to a missional life as well as a life well lived in other areas. Because, really, we are moving towards mission infiltrating every aspect of our life.
We are living an adventure, not a race, and we miss more when we are consumed with not missing out. Let’s take a look at a few things we notice when we quell our impulse to hurry:
- People. In our rush to accomplish and achieve we rush past people we could be noticing, valuing, and building up. Our spouses. Our children. Our neighbors. The clerk at the grocery store whose line you often find yourself in.
- Unexpected beauty. Slowing down sharpens our vision and we begin noticing beauty in places we overlooked before. The world around us is teeming with creativity and beauty, and our souls feel lighter when we take the time to notice and give thanks.
- Little miracles. God is at work all around us, but we can miss it unless we slow down to look for the things that likely would not have happened aside from His intervention.
- Answered prayers. Do we utter prayers and then forget about them? Forget to pray in the first place? When we slow down we can more readily find time for prayer and not miss His answers.
- God’s voice. When we base our worth on our performance, we can get so wound up in trying to earn His attention that we can’t hear He is already talking.
If you have been feeling more than a little lost, irrelevant, or out of tune, here are a few practical steps you can try:
- Unwind. Let time slow. Talk a walk alone. Play instrumental worship music. Try pilates or a yoga flow.
- Assess. Identify where you are out of tune. Invite Jesus to mine with you what’s been buried behind walls of busy.
- Realign. Find a truth in scripture that addresses your struggle and reminds you of who you are in Christ. Write that verse somewhere you will see it multiple times a day. Turn on worship music. I shared my quarantine playlist last week and invite you to listen in to this one I’ve been playing on repeat today.
It seems fitting to end today with prayer. Would you join me?
Prayer for the impatient.
God, You are holy, and good, ever so kind, and unfathomably patient. We’ve been driven, Lord, but now we find the slow drives us towards You.
We’ve been busy, and now we long to be simply present so we don’t miss what we overlook in the hustle and grind.
Would You unwind what’s would up tightly inside us?
Realign us as only You can do.
In Your precious and beautiful name, Lord, we pray. Amen.
Kuykendall, Alexandra. Loving My Actual Neighbor: 7 Practices to Treasure the People Right in Front of You. BakerBooks, 2019.
Verner, Leslie. Invited: The Power of Hospitality in an Age of Loneliness. Herald, 2019.
