Slow living…
Three years ago, I left a job I loved in order to recreate our lives from the inside out. We longed for a simpler, slower, more connected life. I wanted to create a life that felt as good on the inside as it looked on the outside. It’s been a bumpy road. We’ve invited children back home, introduced a new daughter and son in love, and you know, we’ve lived some life. Hands down, this has been the most profound season of our lives with change and loss tangled up with new love and joy.
And yet, even in the midst of all of the living. Our lives are simpler and more peaceful than they’ve been in a very long time. Recently, Keith and I were enjoying a slow Saturday afternoon, when we grinned at each other in the realization that we had done it. We had actually slowed our lives down enough to hear the silent moments.
When this journey began, we could not envision what it might look like to have more blocks of time with less demand. We simply knew we could not continue to live at the velocity we had become accustomed to. Our lives felt thin and weak and our days overflowed with activity and responsibility. Like other moments of change in our lives, we did not know what it might look like, but we knew we didn’t like what we had become.
In some ways, this process has been a lot like spring cleaning. We’ve searched through all the clutter to see what we want now. We tossed a lot and put a few things in the hold box to decide later. We are enjoying the beauty of our newly cleaned up schedule.
We are experiencing the calm joy that comes from a newly cleaned space. The trouble for us isn’t getting it clean, it’s keeping things that way. Now, we have to make the small daily decisions to keep clutter at bay and retain the space we’ve made. This space will only be held by our vigilance.
We’ve been talking a lot about how we want to use this new space in our lives. Keith’s been puttering around in his workshop. I’ve been in the kitchen remembering how to make bread, experimenting with new recipes, and enjoying the simple rhythms of home. We are inviting folks in and spending slow time with people we love.
Beyond anything else, our lives feel more human. We are no longer hurtling from one thing to the next, we are moving at a pace that makes room to wander, to enjoy, and to appreciate the beauty of our ordinary days. This, I think, is worship.
