Stop. Listen for God.

           Earlier this month we took our Junior High Confirmation students to the Minnesota Institute of Contemplatiion and Healing (MICAH) retreat center near Crookston for an overnight to center ourselves for a year of faith development, learning, and service. One of the primary foci of contemplative prayer, as described by MICAH’s director, Trey Everett, is to move us out of our heads and into our hearts. That sounds kind of vague and new-age-y so allow me to explain. In our heads we are concerned with products and efficiency, with “doing it right”, and with doing “enough” versus doing “not enough.” Our hearts, on the other hand, focus us not on the product but the process, not on efficiency but love, not on doing it the “right way” but exploring how we might do something differently, and, lastly, our hearts allow us freedom from the anxiety of worrying about doing enough and, most importantly, about being enough.

            God tends to speak to us on the heart-level, because it is there that we free ourselves from all the things that cause us anxiety and fear; it is there that we are free to be led beyond our expectations and imaginations.

            We live in an anxious world. In fact, the more efficient we get the more anxious we become. There’s this worry in the back of our minds that we can always be working more efficiently; that we can always be doing more; and the frightening reality is that it’s true. We can always be doing more. The New York Times just published an eye-opening exposé of the working environment at Amazon where workers are encouraged to spy on one another, report one another’s inefficiencies, and managers are expected to cull their workers ranks on a regular basis in the name of being as efficient and productive as possible. This might be an exceptional example, but it’s also kind of the norm for how the marketplace works in the year 2015. Farmers feel it. So do business owners and restauranteurs and teachers (maybe especially teachers). Even pastors feel it. How often are our churches judged by money in the bank and people in the seats on Sunday morning?

            All of this is borne out of a well-intentioned desire for progress and growth, but applied to our life in its entirety this ruthless desire for efficiency strangles our relationship with God. It’s nigh impossible to hear God over the bustle of trying to be better, to do better, to become that perfect person. We’re not big on talking about submission to God these days—not because we don’t believe it but because we like to believe that anything that reigns in our unlimited freedom must be bad—but this letting go of living in our heads is precisely what submission is. We stop trying to justify ourselves through our work and we start listening with our hearts. Then, it’s astounding where we will feel led. God doesn’t just talk to us from burning bushes or booming voices from the sky; God often talks to us in the complete silence we find when we finally, mercifully, slow everything down.

            There’s something wonderful about God working in this way after all. It suggests we are not judged by how well we play the game of life (by how much we do or how well we do it), but instead we have a God in Jesus who finds us when we let that need for control fade away. Maybe this is what it means to live in the world but not of it (cf. John 17:14).

            So, here’s a challenge for you today: Let it go. Let go of your need to be the best, to work the hardest. I realize we have practical needs: we need to work to support our families; we feel pressure to perform better in school or in sports; we are tasked with things A, B, or C that seem indispensable. But wisdom is knowing where those callings push us too far away from the God who created us to be more than machinery. You are more than a machine, and you can only discover that if you stop living with your head all day long. You are worth more than the products you help to fashion, and you’ll discover that reality if your relationship with God is given the space and time to grow. Most of all, you are loved. And just as you might forget that your family loves you if you’re only ever passing through on your way to doing something else, so too will the love of God feel cheap and weak if you never slow down, stop, and reflect on it.

            Things are busy, but they don’t have to be. It’s your choice. Stop. Listen. Be open. Your life will change.