Hajja Salesjana

When was the last time you felt your soul walk ? Our minds and bodies are moving farther and faster than ever today, but the most significant aspects of human life cannot be rushed. Hearts can be stubbornly slow. Prayer is often slow. Meditation is slow. Growth is slow. Love is slow, sometimes painfully so. From the beginning, our souls were made to walk with God, at his pace. Many of us, however, have forgotten how to walk. We’re so used to driving, scrolling, and skimming that slow seems not only inefficient and impractical, but almost immoral. We feel guilty for walking. While I commute to work, covering a dozen miles in just minutes, operating the marvelous and dangerous miracle that is my Honda Civic, I sometimes get restless that I’m not getting more done — that I’m not checking email, or refreshing a feed, or listening to a podcast. Some text and drive, despite how maddening and unloving that is, in part because driving surely can’t be a sufficiently productive use of time. We’re held hostage by hurry . “ To really live — to know, enjoy, and follow Jesus — we need to learn and keep a pace that is human .” We’ve been made to believe, by the patterns and course of this world, that hurry is a virtue. But what if hurry was actually oppressing us — distracting us, stunting HOSTAGE TO HURRY RECOVERING THE HUMAN PACE OF LOVE original article by Marshall Segal us, even scheming against us? “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day,” the late Dallas Willard said. “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life” ( The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry , 19). To really live — to know, enjoy, and follow Jesus — we need to learn and keep a pace that is human . In other words, we need to learn to walk again. Faster than God? Why do we talk about  walking  with Jesus? Well, because when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, he walked everywhere he went. Anyone who decided to follow him literally walked where he walked. Think about that. Imagine just how much Jesus could have accomplished with a car, a smartphone, and an Internet connection! But when the Son of God came, he walked, and he walked, and he walked. He slowed down to hold children. He slowed down to visit with strangers. On his way to save a 12-year-old girl who was dying, he slowed down and stopped on the way to heal a desperate older woman (Luke 8:40–48). He slowed down to pray — sometimes for hours at a time. Even though he often didn’t have a comfortable place to lay his head, he slowed down to sleep. He lived the greatest, fullest, most fruitful life ever lived, and he never felt what it was like to move even 25 miles an hour. His days were full, far beyond most photo by Sebastian Meier www.unsplash.com 28 Jannar-Marzu 2022 hajja