Addicted To Busy: Recovery For The Rushed SoulPrøve

The Jesus Pace is Relational

To that issue of differentiating when it’s time to engage and when it’s time to withdraw, I notice that Jesus did another thing really well: he listened to the voice of his Father, and he let those divine whispers guide his life.

This, of course, is what all that “withdrawing” was about. It was about carving out time to pray, to commune, and to lean in.

I was trying to explain this idea recently to a good friend and said, “It’s like this: What if Pam and I invited you and your husband over for dinner, and then, as soon as you arrived, she and I jumped into the car and headed out to run a few errands? You’re left standing there on our front porch, holding the hospitable bouquet of flowers you brought, wondering why you got ditched by your dinner hosts.”

You and I would be flabbergasted by that turn of events too, wouldn’t we? If you get invited to someone’s home for dinner, you kind of expect that someone to be there. You expect to have quality time with him or her, you expect to enjoy unhurried conversation, you expect for things being centered on the get-together at hand.

This is exactly how Jesus treated God. His times of withdrawal, of divine rest, weren’t patronizing scraps tossed God’s way; they were intentional and intimate moments of connection, during which nothing else caught Jesus’s eye. “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything,” Pedro Arrupe said. “It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

Jesus was in love with his Father. And that one great love drove everything he did—and did not do.

It occurred to me as I sat there at my desk this morning that if I had been consumed not with my own plans but instead with entering the rest of God, I would have had reserves from which to joyfully serve those who tend to interrupt my plans.