As I think about that story, especially during this season of Lent, I can see that Laura may have been speaking God’s words to us: “I don’t want you to do anything. I just want to be next to you.” I wonder how many times a day God tries to get our attention, to slow us down, to quiet us long enough so that we can hear God’s whisper.
I wrote recently of the danger our busyness and over-commitments pose to our personal and spiritual lives. Usually, we feel that we have no choice. Life is just like that. If we could, we would get off the treadmill, slow down and take it easy. And we keep telling ourselves that someday in the future – on the weekend, when we get a vacation, or when we retire, things will be different. But will they? I have been down that road as a career missionary, pastor and teacher. I took a subtle pride (it wouldn’t have been “spiritual” to say so) in the fact that I worked 18 hour days, six (and sometimes seven) days a week. I was busy and I was helping people! But now I wonder how much I missed, especially in my relationship with God. I think I have to agree with Marshall Jenkins who writes: “We assume that it is the crazy pace of our lives that is killing us when really it’s our inattention to our deepest desire, the desire for God.”
Henri Nouwen illustrates this point well (the danger inherent in our busyness and distractions) in a meditation he wrote when he returned to the States for a visit from the L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada, where he shared the final years of his life with a group of people with disabilities: “What most strikes me, being back in the United Sates, is the full force of the restlessness, the loneliness, and the tension that holds so many people. The conversations I had today were about spiritual survival. So many of my friends feel overwhelmed by the many demands made on them; few feel the inner peace and joy they so much desire….There seems to be a mountain of obstacles preventing people from being where their hearts want to be. It is so painful to watch and experience. The astonishing thing is that the battle for survival has become so “normal” that few people really believe that it can be different.” [“The Road to Daybreak,” in Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader, ed. Robert Durback (NY: Doubleday, 1997), 54]
What about you? Do you believe that it can be different?
In Claypool’s story about his daughter Laura and her desire simply “to be” present with her father, we have a reminder that God wants us more than our activity. God desires us. And our response in return should be to desire God.
For years, I have been carrying around in my wallet a quote from the great Scottish theologian P.T. Forsyth. It is a warning to all of us who get caught up in busyness, even the busyness of “ministry.” He writes, “It is possible to be so active in the service of Christ as to forget to love him. Many preach Christ but get in front of him by the multiplicity of their own works. It will be your ruin if you do! Christ can do without your works; what he wants is you.”
Like John Claypool’s daughter, Laura, God wants us. He wants to get our attention, to slow us down, to be quiet long enough to hear his call to us. And if we will listen, we will hear that: “The heart of [God] loves us as we are and not as we should be, beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity; He loves us in the morning sun and the evening rain without caution, regret, boundary, limit or breaking point.” (Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, pp. 125-126).
This is one of the many gifts of Lent. It breaks into our life with a reminder to slow down, be quiet, allow ourselves to be reoriented and refocused and open to God’s presence in our life. If we will pay attention we will see and experience things we have never seen or experienced: we will be more fully alive; we will experience life in its depth; we will be more rooted and less rushing; and we will learn how to be more whole, more loving, more caring, more like Christ.
Happy Lent!
