Are you addicted to speed? I don’t necessarily mean that you drive too fast to get a rush of adrenaline, but more about how long you have to wait for a download before you say out loud — to nobody in particular — “this is taking forever!!”
I’m old enough to have lived through the days of dial-up internet, and when I find myself frustrated with wait times, I wonder what dial-up me would have said to broadband me.
Did you know that you and I can download in 2 minutes a file that would have taken 30 hours over a dial-up connection? And that’s not even with the fastest speeds available today? We expect things to happen at lightning speed, I think that’s why I made a funny face at God when I was listening to His word this morning.
Can you picture this? Abraham runs in, winded and a bit frantic (he’d just met with three angelic messengers, so I get it), and shouts to Sarah, “Quick!! Make bread!”
I’m not a bread maker, but I do have Google, so I know that the time it takes to bake bread from scratch depends a lot on the type of bread you’re making; it can be a couple of hours to a day. No matter which one it is, neither of those are quick!
Abraham knew that, of course, and so did Sarah. The idea here wasn’t so much the time of the task, but the urgency of it. “Quick” meant something closer to, “Hey!! This is important, so drop everything else and do this instead!”
Often, the most important things take time. They can’t be rushed, but they can be prioritized. In fact, I would suggest that they must be prioritized. Waiting will never not be a thing we face, but it can be a thing we face with the right posture. Urgent, but intentional. Slow, and methodical.
Quick! Do something slow. Don’t rush the process; trust it instead.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
