Slow Me Down
Have you seen the video of little Emi, talking about the two kinds of people - "ZoomerArounders" and "LayArounders?" If you need a smile, this is for you!
We ZoomerArounders can sometimes wear out our fellow LayArounders a bit. My husband and daughters idea of a perfect weekend is staying home and doing nothing. Mine is a minimum of three social gatherings daily! Without LayerArounders in my life, I will Zoom until I crash with exhaustion.
On my commute into Little Bottoms recently, I was tiredly listening to one of my favorite albums, Worship for Workers by The Porter's Gate. The first song on the album is called Slow Me Down and speaks to the anxiety and restlessness that can fuel a life of working to hard and too long, neglecting God's pastures of peace. It is normal for me to always be searching for a bigger mountain to climb, a project to keep me busy, a larger challenge to solve. So asking the Creator to slow me down is a regular practice in my spiritual life - at least, when I'm mindful as I hope to be.
Upon to returning to Little Bottoms, there were several big mountains that immediately called my name - securing our building and a permanent home being the first one. The days of losing sleep over that are thankfully over, but these days, it's figuring out how to build an infrastructure that will support expanding our service hours, growing our volunteer team, and securing additional donations of goods and monetary support to meet more of our community's needs. It can be easy to let work consume you - especially when the needs feel so urgent.
This work, however, is not mine. Or yours. Or really even ours collectively. It has been, and always will be, the work of the Good Shepherd, who leads us by still waters and who restores our souls. Our "anxious drives to labor on and on" and our "grasping hands afraid God won't provide" will not help us to care for our community better. This work is good, and hard, and beautiful, and important. And I've been reminding myself that we are not the ones accomplishing it - we are joining the work God has already started to make our neighborhoods whole again. It's a joy and an honor to do it, but it is not ours to claim. I can rest in that - I hope you can too.
