“Finding Your Pace”

By the Rev. Dr. Nancy Eldredge Hess

“Feed the Woman” Spiritual Gathering

October 13, 2007,

Trinity Lutheran Church, Worcester, MA

sponsored by

New England Women of the ELCA

Introduction:

I have never been nominated for Mother of the Year award. How many school lunches did I forget to pack. How often did I forget to mend my son’s favorite jeans. How many school events did I miss because of work. My busyness got in the way of my nomination for that award!

I think being busy is part of what it means to be a woman. When my son was little I became the champion of multi-tasking. I could prop him on my hip with a bottle while talking on the phone and stirring soup on the stove! We know we are too busy when we become so preoccupied that we open our freezer door to microwave our coffee. Or when we put the cereal in the fridge and the milk in the cupboard.

Our lives are full. We have family commitments. We have church commitments. We have work responsibilities. We have our errands, our cooking, our housework, our friends, our volunteer work and the list goes on.

While being busy can be a good thing especially when our tasks are acts of service and love, it can also be a threatening thing. Busyness threatens us in many ways.

Being busy can make us feel inadequate. More than once I have felt that I am not a good enough mom, or a good enough pastor or big enough to be Calumet’s executive director. When we have so many plates spinning it is easy to feel like we don’t do anything well.

Being busy also consumes precious time. We spend a lot of time trying to balance all the things in our lives. Just think of all the good things we could do for ourselves with the energy it takes to balance all of our responsibilities.

Being busy can also keep us from being focused. Busyness pulls us in all directions. This adds a tremendous amount of stress to our health, our spirits and our overall well-being.

And finally being busy can make us feel a deep sense of guilt when we want to just say “no” or back out of some of the things that tug at us.

I want you to participate with me. Break into table groups. Share your names. Then talk about the places where you feel time constraints. What are you juggling? (After a time, Dr. Hess asked women to come back together as a group. She asked for responses and made a list.)

Body:

I think it is pretty obvious that we all have a lot going on in our lives. One of the ways we are told to handle all of the demands we face is to find a balance. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of balancing. It seems to me that in order to balance something all the pieces have to be of similar weight. And if your life is like mine, not all of the things I do have equal value or are equally important yet all of them are things I need to do. Lets look at our list. How do we decide which piece is the most important? Is church work more important than a soccer game? Is visiting a sick friend more important than taking time for ourselves?

Balancing is hard work and it doesn’t always work. Our busyness and the time and energy we spend on it can easily become idolatry. In our Christian tradition, anything that takes more importance than God in our lives is an idol. While it might seem to be a stretch I think that sometimes our busy lives become more important than our life with God.

I would like to suggest an alternative to balancing our busyness. Instead of struggling to find a balance, maybe we should think about finding a gentler pace for our lives.

Many of us want to find a gentler pace in our lives. No matter what attempts we make to slow down, life seems to get faster and faster. We can't always stop the merry go round but we can do something to find a center in it all. That center, according to our Christian faith, is grounded in the holy, grounded in the Spirit of God found in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Psalm 95:1-7 reminds us of an important element in finding a center out of which we can gracefully live the demands of our lives:

O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed. O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice! (NRSV)

Psalm 95 reminds us of the central place of worship in our lives. It reminds us to acknowledge the source, continuance and nurturer of all life. God is our God, we read in verse seven, and we are the people of God's pasture. No matter how inadequate we feel, no matter how guilty we feel, no matter how thinly we are spread, no matter how many mistakes we make, we have the promise that God is with us. God shepherds us and keeps us in God’s care.

(Dr. Hess asked women to break into groups again, this time to think about worship. She asked them to call out some aspects of worship. Answers included greeting, listening, singing, food, gathering, the Eucharist, prayer, and others.)

Imagine your life as a worship experience. Choose two of the items from our list and identify something in your day that represents that aspect of worship. (The women were silent for a moment as they contemplated these two aspects of worship.) With some intentionality, worship can become a part of our everyday tasks, even the ordinary tasks. How might work become a worship experience?

Imagine a household task you do on a regular basis. Choose one you find irritating or you feel rushed doing. With eyes closed see yourself preparing to do this task. Take a few seconds to breathe deeply and ask God to bless the work you are about to do. Continue to imagine completing the task. When finished, pause again in your thoughts and thank God for the ability to do the task you just completed.

A simple act of prayer attached to an ordinary responsibility brings the presence of God into our daily lives and frees us from the mundane moments that eat up our time.

I used to think that worship was a once-a-week formal event. But now I understand that worship is an on-going process. It is the offering of praise and thanksgiving moment by moment. It is the acknowledgment that God is ever present in my life during the troublesome demands placed on me as well in as the joyful and playful times. Constant worship means always understanding that I am not alone, that I am being guided, protected, watched over and cared for. When I believe that, I am given the faith and encouragement to do all my labors as well as my play, with my heart focused on God.

In so doing, while our pace doesn't really change, we change within our hectic lives. There is peace instead of craziness, meaning instead of doldrums, and purpose instead of just going through the motions. Pacing ourselves according to the rhythms of praise and thanksgiving grounds us in the gifts of grace that God abundantly gives and establishes us in the calm center we long for.

A few days ago, I was talking about this with my friend Jack. He recognized that women often feel like they walk a tight rope. He also reminded me that in order for tightrope walkers to be successful they have to find just the right pace, not too fast or not too slow. And I remembered learning that tightrope walkers need to look ahead, not up, not down. Isn’t this what we need to do too?

We can find just the right pace if we take a worshipful stance in our lives. And to do that all we need to do is look ahead to the cross. Be bathed in God’s grace. Allow God to be gentle with you. And then be gentle with yourself.

Let us pray:

God, our Good Shepherd,

Thank you for your ever-present tending; for keeping us close to you and drawing us back to you when we wander off. In the midst of our busy lives help us to always be mindful of you, the center of our lives. Give us the wisdom and character to worship you with our every breath so that we may find our pace in the movement of your grace. Amen