God Pace

I'm sat writing this on a Sunday, typically one of the fullest days of my week, that was of course until a fortnight ago when everything began to grind to a public gathering halt. A typical Sunday would have been made up of Church, prep, Church service and then post Church tea and coffee. Home for food watch some football - always some football in the afternoon, and soon it would be time to get ready for Church again, home for food, football (American this time) and then bed. Sundays were full, not bad full, but full.

This Sunday, however, I am sat with the sun coming through the window, music playing and my laptop. 

Today is a slow Sunday, and you know what, I hope it is the first of many!

I love Church, I am a passionate believer in it, but it has been an eye-opener to slow down! I mean I've read a chunk of Genesis, two chapters of my book (about hurry, more on that later!!), cooked, washed up, listening to music on my vinyl player and I made coffee, the slow way, with a pour-over!

I don't believe in coincidences, I believe in a God who is at work in all sorts of ways and brings things together just so. It is with this understanding that I find it humorous that I am reading through Genesis (reading through books of the bible is a relatively new discipline of mine and one I highly recommend, my mum even did it with Esther recently!), I'm reading a book on the Elimination of Hurry (by the brilliant John Mark Comer), there is no way I can leave the house and do community as I understand it, I own a vinyl player and love making coffee (and drinking it). All in all, this had added up to this post, God pace. I am sure the idea of a God pace has been had before, but today it's a revelation to me. 

Genesis 1 has the account of creation, of six days of doing, creating, crafting, bringing to life, and then one day of rest. Sabbath. 

In the 'Ruthless Elimination of Hurry', author John Mark Comer talks of the problem with speed, the relentless desire to hurry and the detrimental effect it is having on humanity as a whole.

Covid-19 has forced a quick world to slow down, fast fashion to press pause, big replaced with small and local, staying in is the new going out!

Music and coffee, the slow way! Don't get me wrong; I love my Spotify account and a good independent coffee shop, but taking time to place the needle and grind the coffee makes it sound and taste all the sweeter.

On the seventh day God had completed His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it He rested from all His work of creation

Genesis 2:2-3

I was blown away by the idea that God rested, not that He just rested, but that He rested after being creative! I look at the way I can fall into bed at the end of the day, worthy of rest for all my hard work, but how often have I created? Have I done a lot and made very little? 

I want to be able to rest and look back on the creativeness of my week. I want that to inspire me, I don't want to crash, to be so done with the week I'm 'living for the weekend', no I want to be ready to rest from creativity to spend time with the original creator.

To stop my doing and take in what He has been doing for all eternity. Not just creation, although if you're stuck for where to begin with slowing down, going for a walk is a great start here in Wales! 

But seeing what God has done through others, taking the time to read, to listen, to see what people post on Instagram not simply liking it because they posted it. Could it be that Genesis 1 is the rhythm? Could we have had the guide since the beginning and yet we have spent our entire lives moving away from it!

That God's pace was one of extravagant creation and contentment! I mean have you thought about it, God didn't nitpick his creation, he didn't get to the end of the day and look out and think, a little to the left and slightly more orange would make that ball of light perfect, nope instead God made, saw it was good and concluded the work there. In a world where we continuously strive for more, for bigger, for better. Are we ever truly content? Are we ever ready to say of our work, it is good? Yet throughout creation, and even in the Gospels, we see a God who is willing to do work, and then do rest, do creation and do sabbath, do healing and do eating. 

Since needing to work from home every day, the urge to grab my laptop and tweet this, and change that has gone through the roof. And yet it is by being at home I get to see the wonder of my daughter learning to count in Welsh when she is first language English. By being home, I get to make my lunch rather than popping over the road to Greggs!

God pace, is not unproductive, it is not lazy, it is not and could never be selfish. No God pace is the speed at which we were created to move. 

A vinyl player needs the needle to contact the vinyl record to make sound, removing the record from its slipcase, placing it on the player, raising the arm, moving it and then lowering it (and getting that satisfying static noise as it settles onto the record) before the music begins. If you want another song, you need to lift and move all over again, and if you want song six, you will probably need to lift the record and spin it over. There is no fast forward, no library of every song ever written, there is, simply and beautifully, slowly, calculated, created sound. I think worship in heaven will take on the pace of a vinyl record, created and considered and all the more beautiful for it.

God pace, the speed at which things were meant to move.

In his book, Mark Comer talks of reading. Reading is slow, I completed my degree by reading what I needed to, just enough to get a pass in places, and even that took too long at times! But reading is slow, and we don't have the time for slow right? Well, read this little extract from his book;

"The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year… in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That's over an hour a day.

But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours.

TV… 2,737.5 hours." 

(The ruthless elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer, Hodder & Stoughton, 2019)

I mean, I don't really have an excuse to not achieve with those kinds of numbers committed to social media and TV! Please hear me, I'm not saying these things are bad, but I am saying we seem to have got our priorities a little off. If the God Pace is one of contemplation, deliberate acts of creativity in line with the creator, then we need to be aware that we do have the time to be creative, we just maybe need to put down the phone for a little while to achieve it.

I wonder what you could achieve if you allowed the creativity within you to have actual time to flourish, what could you accomplish this week by slowing down a little? In a culture that assumes quickly is good, and busy is status, what does it feel like to break the chains of the world's view of productivity and replace it with God’s understanding of creativity?

We read of no rush, no haste, no anxiety in Genesis 1, just the controlled creativity of God, who knew when to stop, reflect and rest.