slow
originally posted January 17, 2022
I’m reading John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry with my New Creation family1 this summer. And that’s perfect because I am always trying to slow down.
In some ways, I feel like this is the slowest pace I’ve ever had, the most margin I’ve ever had in my schedule. And in other ways, it feels like I’m still on a hamster wheel, though I keep trying to get off.
Or maybe it’s just that my nervous system still hasn’t caught up; it runs on anxious hyperdrive most of the time, as if it doesn’t know I’ve evolved past having to run away from predators and that I’ve stepped away from as many stress-inducing spaces as possible.
Even so, I’m taking a deep breath, grateful to be part of a community encouraging me to hit the brakes.
I’ve slowed down, and I’m trying to go even slower.
But then, I also want God to hurry up.
The times keep feeling more and more apocalyptic. You don’t have to look far or think long to find a situation where God seems to be slow and sleeping. How long, O Lord, until You set these broken things right? And why don’t You stop Your people who are making it all so much worse? Fix us!
So I keep trying to slow down myself. And I keep praying for faith and patience to wait through my perceived slowness of God.
And that brings me to this old post from my old blog. It’s more than two years old now, so you can do the math. I wrote this when I was 34, and I turn 37 this week. Where does the time go? And would it pass more slowly, more peacefully, more meaningfully if we all quit being in such a hurry?
I’ve never been good at biblical timelines and math, but there’s one calculation I feel reasonably sure of:
God is slow.
At least by my estimation.
Take Father Abraham for example.
He was 75 when God first sent him out into the unknown with the promise of making him a great nation.
Genesis life expectancies notwithstanding, that still feels really old to be hearing for the first time any sort of direction for your life.
For fun, I just decided to attempt the math, adjusting for an 80-year lifespan. And if I figured correctly, the timing of God’s promise to Abraham, in our day and time, would come around age 34, and I’m laughing like Sarah because that’s how old I happen to be.
And that’s not really that old. But in a world where we dress up like what we want to be when we grow up as early as preschool and choose our career paths no later than 18, just starting to get the first inkling of a plan from God at age 34 sounds preposterously late.
And even then, fulfillment of the promise was still far off.
Abraham and Sarah would wait on their slow God another decade before impatiently concocting a plan of their own and Abraham would father Ishmael at age 86.
And Abraham was nearly 100 when God again reassured him that the promise would come through a son from the womb of Sarah. I’m not sure exactly how long it took after that, but there are two chapters of weird stories to wade through between God’s third assurance of the promise and when Isaac is finally born.
That is a lot of waiting. That is a slow pace. And that is just the start of the story.
I guess Abraham should have known, and I guess all of us reading his story ought to realize too, that God’s not in a hurry—
After all, when God promises Abraham that his descendants will be like the stars of the sky, He also includes the detail that they’ll live like strangers in a land that’s not their own and be enslaved and oppressed for 400 years.
That’s not quite the news or timeline I would expect in a divine promise of greatness.
But that’s God for you.
With 400 years of slavery baked right into the promise, it makes the 40 years in the wilderness that followed them seem kinda quick. And all of this math only gets us as far as the second book of the Bible, and I’m weary just thinking of all that comes next in the story, all the back and forth to and from exile, all the centuries of waiting that generations of Israelites still had to endure before Jesus would be born.
And so I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised that we’ve been waiting so long since He came the first time for Him to come again.
God is slow.
And I know it’s probably my perspective that’s off. God’s timing is perfect, right? I’m the one who misjudges the pace.
But I think it’s fair to say, from where we stand, 2000+ years since our Savior came and went and promised He’d be back—
from where we stand, 2 years into a pandemic that seems it will never end—
from where we stand, in a world broken and full of poverty, injustice, hatred, violence, and death—
God seems slow.
Slow to act.
Slow to intervene.
Slow to save.
When will it all be put to rights? By our hands or by God’s, when will all that’s broken be repaired and redeemed?
Thinking about God’s slowness, I thought of verses I’ve heard people quote encouragingly before, and I looked them up:
“But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.”
— 2 Peter 3:8-9, emphasis added on the part often quoted alone
These verses feel a bit less encouraging in context. Lots of talk about floods, fire, judgment, and destruction.
They also make God seem even slower, since Peter apparently wrote them to assure believers who worried God’s promises should have been fulfilled already, and here we are a few millennia later. Still waiting.
Slow.
It all feels so super slow.
It makes me wonder if I could be mistaken about God and His promises. If what I believe were true, surely things would be fulfilled by now. Or at least a lot better, right?
And in my impatience, I join Abraham and Sarah and the first century believers holding Peter’s letter in their hands, asking—
Why is God so slow?
And Peter takes the word slow and turns it so I can see it in a new light.
God is slow:
Slow to anger.
Slow to condemn.
Slow to destroy.
Peter looks at God’s slowness and counts it patience.
God is patient.
Patient toward me. Patient toward this world that I, in my zeal to fix it, would no doubt destroy in flood or flame if judgment were up to me.
I won’t pretend I’m not still struggling with the pace. I’m impatient with God and the world and myself. I want all to be perfect now. Yesterday.
And I don’t have any answers that are any more satisfying than the answer God gave Job for his suffering, which was not an answer but a set of rhetorical questions that basically just poetically put us all in our place.
Who am I to think I know so much? Who am I to think my brain could even comprehend the answers if God gave them to me?
Who am I to know what’s slow or fast? Whether God is slow to fulfill His promises or right on time?
Like Job, after already having said way too much, I shut my mouth.
And just thank God He’s patient.
Have I mentioned how much I love my earnest little church family? I know I have. I restrain myself from saying it more. My heart feels home.