Slowing down...

So, here we are… entering 2025. We are roughly a quarter of a way through the 21st century.

This is quite a startling thought if you remember celebrating the dawn of the year 2000. How does the passage of this quarter century feel to you? How have you grown – and struggled – spiritually during this time?

For all of us, the cliché is true: the older we get, the quicker the years seem to go by. Time passes, indeed hastens. And the pace of life seems to get ever faster.

So perhaps we all need to slow down. And the turn of a New Year is no bad time to reflect on that. More than a century ago, the poet Minnie Louise Haskins wrote these words:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied:
‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

In some ways, that echoes even older words, of course, such as those of Psalm 143:8 – ‘Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul…’. And perhaps we all need to slow down to take time to do that.

In 1 Samuel 13, Saul rushes ahead of the Lord – failing to wait for the word that would come through Samuel. In the Keswick devotional on this passage, Peter Maiden comments: ‘Essentially [Saul] was saying, “We should be waiting for divine orders, but too much is happening. We haven’t got time to wait for God.” Saul’s tragic failure begins as self-sufficiency grows in his heart. He has no time to wait for God, no time to listen.’

Elizabeth McQuoid adds: ‘Make time to linger in God’s presence; prayerfully admit your dependence on Him and ask Him to speak to you through His word. Over the long haul, it is this daily decision, more than any other, that results in a life of faithfulness.’