I have come to a realization that I have been hard charging so much following the Father’s calling, that sometimes I have to sit and wait for my soul to catch-up with me.  Morgan Snyder, at the Become Good Soil Intensive last month, shared that the most beautiful thing God does is take time.  I’ve thought about that a lot in the last month.  We often get so fired-up about new ideas and new directions that it’s easy to hard charge in.  I’ve worked my tail off with this Counseling degree the last year looking to get through the end of the program and begin to truly work with people, putting all of these new skills and ideas to use.

I was on campus at Liberty University last week for my second of three intensives.  Sitting in a group discussion the Lord put on my heart that I needed to be okay with time.  I don’t need to charge ahead 100 miles per hour.  He helped me to realize that I needed to just relax.  Growth, both as a counselor and in my faith is a life-long journey.  He told me to be okay with the process and the journey.

I realized something.  What a real gift time is.  It will take a whole lifetime for me to grow remotely close to who God created me to be.  What I can do now and continue to seek Him out and knowing that there will bumps in the road.  He’s growing me up right now just as He seeks to grow us all up, but that growing takes time.  John Eldredge wrote, “It takes courage to seek God, and courage to wait for His reply.”

I’m thankful for the time the Father has taken for my life and for my growth.  There is so much grace to be received, there is so much that the Father has in store for us in the life to come and we will spend the rest of our lives here in this world trying to seek that out.  Perfection won’t come in this life.  The Father is using time to grow us, to mold us into who we were intended to be.  To shake free from the old and come into the new.  This takes a lifetime.

So let’s slow down.  The world will tell us time and time again that we need to go faster and faster.  Everything needs to be done yesterday.  This is a sure fire way to be taken out and I have seen the carnage of this happening all over the place.  Good people completely taken out by busyness and the rush and demands to be done now and done faster.

Slow down.  The Father is not in any kind of a rush.  The goal of our lives and in growing with God is union with Him and the fruit is intimacy with the Father.  Busyness is the enemy of intimacy.  Jim Winney said, “When I am busy, the Father is quiet.”  While the world has gotten itself in a big hurry, the Father hasn’t, and we don’t need to either.  This is a hard lesson for me, that I have to remind myself about over and over.  It is soul killing.  Don’t let that happen.  Allow for the Father’s gift of time to truly grown you the way He intends.