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August 25 - September 4, 2025
do not let your phone set your emotional equilibrium and your news feed set your view of the world.
In the same vein social media is a black hole. As a tool it’s fine. But it’s rarely just a tool.
I enjoy Instagram because I can follow my friends and it’s visual. But I don’t let myself look at it more than once a day.
“Garbage in, garbage out.” Every…single…thing that we let into our minds will have an effect on our souls.
Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts.
I want to be fully present to the moment: to God, other people, work in the world, and my own soul. That’s more than enough to consume my attention.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the greatest followers of Jesus I know—mentors, spiritual directors, older and wiser Jesusy folk—pretty much all walk slow. And it’s not because they are dull or out of shape or have asthma. It’s on purpose. Deliberate. The by-product of years of apprenticeship under the easy yoke.
Where in the world am I trying to get to so fast? We literally have no place to be!
It’s Sabbathy but a bit different; it’s my time to center. Check my pulse. See if I’m actually living the way I want to live, in line with my convictions. I look back over the previous month; check the schedule for the month ahead. Pull out my life plan and annual goals; track my progress. Journal the ways I sense God coming to me with his invitations.
Breathe in love, breathe out the anger… Breathe in joy, breathe out the sadness and pain… Breathe in peace, breathe out the anxiety and uncertainty of tomorrow… Breathe in patience, breathe out the hurry of my life…
Persons who meditate become people of substance who have thought things out and have deep convictions, who can explain difficult concepts in simple language, and who have good reasons behind everything they do. Many people do not meditate. They skim everything, picking and choosing on impulse, having no thought-out reasons for their behavior. Following whims, they live shallow lives.17
We must ruthlessly eliminate hurry, and that’s best done gamefully.
“How are you?” He answers, “At this point in my life, I’m just trying to not miss the goodness of each day, and bring my best self to it.”
Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.
to. I want so badly to live from a deep place of love, joy, and peace.
“the practice of the presence of God”2 because it takes practice to live from attention and awareness. Especially in the modern world.
These four practices—silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing—have helped me tremendously to move toward abiding as my baseline. But to say it yet again, all four of them are a means to an end.
The end isn’t silence and solitude; it’s to come back to God ...
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It isn’t Sabbath; it’s a restful, grateful life of ease, appreciation, wonder, and worship. It isn’t simplicity: it’s freedom and focus on what matters most.
It isn’t even slowing; it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment. And the goal is practice, not perfection. Multiple times a day, I slip back into hurry. The gravitational pull is overwhelming at times.
Lately, when that happens, I have this little mantra I repeat: Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept...
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“Every now is an eternity if it is full of God.”3
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity…. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present…or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.4
All the best stuff is in the present, the now.
Each moment is full of goodness. Why are we in such a hurry to rush on to the next one? There’s so much here to see, to enjoy, to gratefully receive, to celebrate, to share.
“What can anyone give you greater than now?”5
I’m just trying to not miss the goodness of each day.
“Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as [Jesus] did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”6
If it’s true that goodness and mercy follow me “all the days of my life,”8 how many days do I miss that goodness in my helter-skelter race to cram it all in before sunset? Rush past that mercy in my blitzkrieg through urban life? “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is the mantra of a soul living in denial of God and outside the flow of eternity.
No more. I commit from here on to ruthlessly eliminate hurry. I fail, naturally. Multiple times a day. And when I do? I begin again… Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment…
I wish I could tell you that after a few years of practice I have this down. I’m never in a hurry. Consider it eliminated, check. I just live and love in a perpetual zen-like state of Jesus-derived joy and peace. Alas, I live in the same place as you: the modern world. With all its privilege and all its pain. All its wealth and hedonic pleasure and good coffee and urban delight, alongside its stress and digital...
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Then I predictably get sucked back into hurry, usually several times a day. I lose my emotional equilibrium. I fall out of sync with the Spirit. When that happens, I reset. Begin again. This time, slowly…
But if your journey is anything like mine, it will feel like three steps forward, two steps back. That’s normal, healthy even. The key is to keep at it. The tortoise, not the proverbial hare. When you err, just begin again.
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.10
had to make peace with who I am. And who I’m not. I had to let go of the envy, the fantasy, the cancerous restlessness. To accept, gratefully: this is my life.
“Your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow.”13
What’s hard isn’t following Jesus. What’s hard is following myself, doing my life my way; therein lies the path to exhaustion. With Jesus there’s still a yoke, a weight to life, but it’s an easy yoke, and we never carry it alone.
“Come to me…. Find rest for your souls.”
