"slow today": for those of us running fast, but wanting slow

April 18th was a Friday. On Fridays this spring, we packed a cooler, beach chairs, and books and headed for Fleming Beach. We called them Fleming Fridays — this weekend appetizer of crashing waves (the surfers found their way to Fleming many Fridays), lazy sea turtles, and novel reading. We stayed until just before sunset and, after climbing up into our Dodge Ram 2500 (the vehicle our friends kindly loaned us for our stay), settled into the twenty-minute drive home. We watched the sun sink behind the ocean horizon as we drove. The sky was black when we pulled into home — the darkness falls swiftly on the islands.

Nate would tuck the girls into bed and start a game of chess with Bo while I stuck my nose back in a book for the rest of the night.

Life was unusually slow for 100 days — the kind of slow we could never recreate in a city with swim meets and jury duty and birthday parties and dentist appointments. It was a dreamy kind of slow, but not without all the loud from our insides that were finally permitted to speak up when lunch dates and meal trains didn’t crowd them out. Nate felt sadder than he had in years during that first month living on the Pacific, not just because of circumstances but mostly because of the time and space to be sad over our losses. I felt more anxious. We had cause for both … and we also wondered if those feelings had been there much longer than we'd noticed them. Extended slow marched them into our conscious thinking … and our praying and talking to God and one another. They ruled us less that way, these invisible potencies.

Try as I might, I cannot recreate the rarity of what we had for our one hundred days on that island. But I came home with the growing awareness that my heart and mind and body … and faith in God … need a measure of slow (greater than I've had in years past) to function. These gears require oil to work well.

A bit more than one month later, and I'm not packing for Fleming Beach but continuing conversations with one, two, three, four … twelve contractors about how and when to rebuild this house of ours that's been torn to the studs. I wake at 5:20, near daily, with the "Oh shoot! I forgot to text JoeContractor about this update!" This, plus navigating young adult job hunts and five-year-old squirminess. Rest isn't the low-hanging fruit it was just a few short weeks ago.

So what do we do? I say "we" because I know I'm among a growing number of people who see the negative impact upon our bodies, our relationships, our minds, and, ultimately, our relationships with God from the pace at which we've all been running … and yet we still have sick parents and sick children and second jobs to pay the bills and … houses to rebuild. The luxury that the hardest moment of our lives foisted upon us — one hundred days of forced rest — is a veritable unicorn.

I can fondly recall that time, but I can't return to it.

What do we do — those of us who have a mind toward pacing ourselves with the pace of Jesus, but a life that barrels along because of unchangeable things?