Funny how slowing down... helps!

Today felt... sane.  Whole.  Alive.  To be sure there were a number of hassles, but because I am working tenderly at really making my schedule SLOW, even the interruptions were part of the blessings.  What's more, tonight our first adult study/conversation brought out a sweet collection of people eager to become more play-full in pursuit of God's peace and justice. We are reading Jaco Hamman's very insightful - and challenging - new book:  A Play-Full Life: Slowing Down and Making Peace.

Writer Christian McEwen put it like this in her new book, World Enough and Time:

We live in a culture that is obsessed with speed, a culture wracked by strange illnesses and persistent low-level fatigue. “How are you?” one friend asks another, and the answer is the same, across almost all categories of age and race and class and gender:  “I’m just so busy,” people tell each other, half-proud, half overwhelmed. “Really, I’m crazy-busy. How are you?” The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, spoke of this as “the frenzy of the activist that neutralizes his/her work for peace,” or the rush and pressure of modern life that has become… perhaps the most common form of innate violence.”

Last night, after all the angst of a month of losing control of my calendar - and fretting about our annual meeting - Dianne said, "You look ten years younger man... and you are finally back after being very distant for the past month."  I felt that, too and give thanks to God that I am in a more grounded place.