Fast and Slow

While undoubtedly true that smoke detectors save lives, far more often they scare the bejeebers out of people. If you’re not entirely sure what bejeebers are, they have something to do with hearing the shrill, pulsing sound of all the smoke detectors in your entire house going off at 3:30 in the morning because your Airbnb guests burned a bagel before their early flight. That’s when you discover what bejeebers are, just as they are being scared out of you.

That may have happened to us.

Inside each of our bodies we have a sympathetic nervous system that triggers a fight-or-flight response to stimuli. It acts as our inner alarm and blares whenever we see a rattlesnake coiled and looking in our direction, when we skydive, give a teenager that first driving lesson, or endure awful telephone music for hours on hold. And, it turns out, the inner alarm blares when the outer one does (as when someone burns their bagel). When this happens, don’t expect to get back to sleep any time soon, because the sympathetic nervous system dumps adrenaline into the bloodstream, and adrenaline works well for those times in life when we need to fight or take flight. It’s not good as a sleep aid…

The twenty-first century had a rugged beginning. The millennium started with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, leading to economic angst, then a terrorist attack that shook our national confidence and sense of safety. Controversial military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan followed, and then the Great Recession. Then a pandemic landed, driving the world into isolation and fear. Parks and meeting houses became eerily quiet as we turned toward Zoom, Facetime and Teams for consolation and community. As we write this book, we are enduring some of the most hotly contested and contentious presidential elections in US history, leading to hostility and division throughout the nation, the Russo-Ukrainian and Israel-Hamas wars are raging, gun violence punctures our collective humanity monthly, and climate disasters show up regularly in the news cycle. Tragedies keep rolling in like storm clouds on the horizon.

There are reasons our sympathetic nervous systems have raced for twenty-five years now, and our most beautiful human qualities and our social connections suffer in response… The intentional quiet ways of being that make us most human and most attuned to one another get easily lost when we live in the flurry of stress, dissent, and tragedy…

Pause: Stop, just now, and think of something good that still happens in your various communities as they bring faith, hope, and love to hurting people. Hold this contribution with gratitude and see it as a sign of God’s continued faithfulness to use communities as the healing hands and feet of Christ.

James, in his New Testament epistle, suggests being ​“quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry” (Jas 1:19). Perhaps humanity has always tended to get this backward, to be slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry. How might we lean into the alternative path James offered 2000 years ago?

Now might be a good time for another breath — a deeper and longer breath. Despite all the anger, violence, and division, good things are also happening…

It’s not just that we are stressed. We are also resilient.

We still love and work and play and laugh. We put gratitude apps on our phones so we can remember to be thankful, our kids laugh on the playground, and they play soccer for fun as parents and grandparents huddle around to cheer them on. Drivers are often courteous on the highways; families and friends gather for good food and conversation. We meet together, sing praise choruses, engage in meaningful conversation, offer loving acts of kindness to people we know and some we don’t. People make homemade sugar cookies and sourdough bread and delight in wood-fired pizza.

In the past couple of decades we have seen the world work collaboratively to understand viruses and develop vaccines. Many have also continued to fight extreme poverty and hunger, racism, sex trafficking, and the challenges of a changing climate. Some do the good work of bringing health care to those without it, others of strengthening forest and ocean health and developing affordable renewable energy sources. We still compose music, create art, plant apple trees and dahlias, heal the sick, clothe the naked, and visit the widow and orphan. We have continued, as it were, to pour ourselves out generously, mirroring God, whose generous outpouring of love keeps the world from coming apart.

Christian faith has deep treasures to offer us, which we will explore throughout the book. As humans made in God’s image, we have choice as we move through our days, weeks, months, and years. How will we choose to live, and who will we choose to be in this highly charged era? How do we practice at living well, at forming ourselves to help us walk through hard things with resilience and grace? How do we return to the slow rhythms of calm and quiet? How can we create quiet space to slow down, breathe, see what needs to be seen, and to think deep thoughts while held in the loving gaze of God?