Wow! I have spent too much time on this. It is what it is. . .
Stopping as a Radical Act
To start, we might ironically first need to stop. But immersed in nonstop news and entertainment, many find it a lost art to be able to pause and deeply rest. Have you noticed how getting in even fifteen minutes of reading can seem almost impossible these days? Rather than blame a “boring book,” maybe this says more about us.
If that’s true, what would it mean to experiment with fresh, creative ways of approaching our lives?
Reaching a better place may not be as impossible as we may imagine. One thirty-some couple wrote about remembering a time “when things did not move quite so fast. When it wasn’t expected that everyone was reachable at all times.”
Finding a better balance doesn’t mean “sitting in a rocking chair for twelve hours a day,” they added, but rather finding a healthy pace of life filled with good accomplishments, without simultaneously feeling like “were constantly drowning. Shouldn’t that be a reasonable thing to want?[x] We think so.
Welcome to the New Counterculture
Given these broader trends, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a new revolution is afoot in American and the Western world as a whole. Rather than opposing technology or efficiency or work or stress (all of which can be welcome parts of life), this is an uprising against the depletion of our inner world when any of these come to dominate our attention.
This revolution invites people to slow down, stop more, and cultivate more stillness and silence in our lives. “While the rest of the world roars on,” Carl Honoré writes, “a large and growing minority is choosing not to do everything at full throttle. In every human endeavor you can think of . . . these rebels are doing the unthinkable—they are making room for slowness.”[xi]
This hunger for more space is evident in popular books such as Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, & Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives; Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book About a (Really) Big Problem; and How to Have More Time: Practical Ways to Put an End to Constant Busyness and Design a Time-Rich Lifestyle.[xii]
While these books grapple with life in an accelerating society, other important questions remain: How is this hyperstimulated, rushed cultural influencing how we experience the quiet message of Jesus? In what ways could it be changing our experience of gospel practices? And what happens when a certain spiritual practice doesn’t “stimulate” us or “meet our needs” or “make us happy” in the ways we’ve come to expect with so many other things in our culture?
Exploring these questions may shed light on why some people are “not feeling it” when it comes to faith, while at the same time many others are feeling more enriched and restored as they approach these “same” faith practices.
Our experience has been that infusing any of these spiritual practices with more stillness, space, and silence changes them profoundly. Sabbath becomes more of a restorative retreat, temple worship, a deep immersion into non-doing, and prayer a contemplative practice of quiet communion.
That depends, of course, on our being willing to approach these practices with fresh eyes—and perhaps even breaking from ingrained habits of efficiency.
Are you willing to become even more counterculture in this regard? ~ Jacob Z. Hess, Carrie L. Skarda, Kyle D. Anderson, Ty R. Mansfield The Power of Stillness (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book 2019) p. 6-7
[x] Tanja Hester, “The World is Speeding Up. We’re Eager to Slow Down,” Our Next Life, September 5, 2016, https://ournextlife.com/2016/09/05/sleepup-slowdown/.
[xi] Honoré, In Praise of Slowness, 13-14
[xii] Swenson, Margin; Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013; and Martin Meadows, How to Have More Time: Practical Ways to Put an End to Constant Busyness and Design a Time-Rich Lifestyle Meadows Publishing, 2016)
