My shoulder ached. After a few weeks with no improvement, I thought it was time to seek some answers. A week later I found myself with the Physical Therapist scheduling regular visits. I kept hoping that one day I’d wake up and be pain free.  Don’t we all feel like that sometimes? Months went by. The shoulder continued to hurt. I wanted the truth to be different than reality. I wanted my arm to repair itself. To be whole once again without help from a surgeon! It was not to be. I needed the surgeon’s skill to remove the obstacles to recovery.  I think we face spiritual truth often with that same perspective:  Avoidance.  Denial. Procrastination.  Something is wrong in our lives, or causing pain in our hearts. It might be a relationship or a circumstance…and we want to deny the need for change. We hope the problem will go away. Or, if not, that the road to recovery will be easy. That the tension or difficulty will ease by itself....

I find myself – maybe you do too – attracted to ever-increasing efficiency, productivity and hurry. In our culture, these qualities have become the undercurrents of striving and accomplishing. The need for speed shows up in our lives and in our language: speed reading, speed eating, even speed walking. How easy it is for us to blindly follow where our culture leads, living at a pace that stretches our personal resources and strains our limits. Without realizing it, our need to “do” can become a series of unbroken tasks which make us feel a sense of being chronically short of time. Even worse, we can begin to believe that we arewhat we do.  Yet as a Jesus-follower, all of this seems to be at odds with God’s words in Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God”. Our meaning comes from our connection with him, not our list of accomplishments. And we’ll never really know him fully unless we sometimes choose to be still. Furthermore, if we are not careful, our incessant bus...