Practicing Presence

Transcript

Welcome And Lent Series Frame

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, good morning and welcome. It's great to be with you. My name is Mac. I'm one of the pastors on our team. Also, I want to welcome all of you who are joining us from home. Thanks so much for tuning in. We're nearing the end of Lent. Easter is just one week away. Woohoo! Our series for Lent this year is entitled Practicing Resurrection. Now remember that resurrection is not just a future promise. It's not just something we wait for. It's something that we're to practice in the present. In Christ, you've been given new life, right? And that new life you're to live into right here and right now. You're to embody it in the present. One of the ways Paul talks about this in the New Testament is that we're to take off the old self and then put on the new self. And so that's really been the heartbeat of this series. Each week we've been naming something we're to take off in old self practice or habit, way of relating and behaving, in order to put on the new self, right? That represents who we are in Christ. I want to remind you that this entire process of taking off and putting on is saturated in God's grace. In other words, we don't transform ourselves by jumping on the treadmill of self-improvement and trying really hard. Rather, the way we experience transformation in our lives is simply by attending to God's grace, opening up our lives to God's grace, and then surrendering to it in love. And as we do that, what happens is God reshapes our hearts and he changes our character, he transforms us from the inside out. Today I want to talk about how to take off hurry by putting on presence. A characteristic of the old self, apart from Jesus, is hurry. A type of hurry that's rooted in self-reliance and anxious striving. And the gospel invites us to exchange that for trust-filled, abiding, and attentive presence. The opposite of hurry is not patience, it's presence. Learning how to be present to God, to ourselves, and to others in love. And so, how do we take off hurry and put on presence? That's the question I want to chase down with you today. I want to start here. We live in a culture of incessant hurry and unrelenting busyness. Incessant hurry and unrelenting busyness. There's a now somewhat famous exchange that took place between Dallas Willard and John Ortberg. Dallas Willard is kind of a famous Christian philosopher. John Ortberg, at the time of this exchange, was the teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church. And at this time, Willow Creek was by far the most influential church in the entire world. And as the teaching pastor, he was world-known. He'd also written several books that were bestsellers. So he's kind of an up-and-coming Christian superstar. Everybody know on the outside, everything's looking good, but on the inside, behind the scenes, his soul is shrinking. The pace of life is killing him as he's gotten sucked into the vortex of mega church madness. And so he ends up phoning Dallas Willard and explaining what's happening to him. And he goes, What do I do? What do I do about this? And there's a long pause on the other end of the phone. And then Dallas said this: He said, You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. And then John Orpbrook said, Okay, fine. Uh, but what else? And there's another pause. He said, No, that's it. There is nothing else. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life, because hurry is the great enemy of our spiritual lives. So, how do we do that? That exchange, by the way, is what led John Mark Comer to write the book by that title, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which is an amazing resource. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to. I'm going to be drawing on it quite a bit today. Friends, we live in a culture bound by busyness and held hostage by hurry. And the reason why I'm naming this is because we can't take off what we can't name. The first step in taking off the old and putting on the new is we need to develop language and eyes to see what it is that we need to take off in order to put something else on. We can't take off what we're unwilling or can't name. So let's start here. What do I mean by hurry? Here's a definition for you. Hurry is a chronic state of urgency driven by anxious striving. A chronic state of urgency driven by anxious striving. So just note that hurry is not the same thing as activity. It's not the same thing as having responsibility. It's not the same thing as having a full plate. Having a full plate is not the problem. The problem is having a frantic soul. Okay, so underneath this hurry note is an inner state of urgency. An inner state chronic sense of urgency driven by an emotional state of anxiety. And out of that, then it leads to frantic scurrying and anxious striving. The word hurry actually is associated with the word hurricane. And I love that because it gives like a little image of what happens when we're in a hurry. We become hurricanes, which of course then leads to doing damage to others and to everything else around us. Hurry's that feeling. Maybe you've had this before, where you just have too much to do. And that underlying fear that I don't know how I'm gonna get it all done, right? And so what happens is it leads to this hustle, this excessive haste, driven by fear and anxiety that it's all on me, and if I don't get it done, everything's going to fall apart. You'll notice that I'm framing hurry as a negative thing. But it's worth noting that in our culture, it's actually the exact opposite. Um, in our culture, busyness is considered a badge of honor. So in our culture, busyness isn't a bad thing, it's considered a badge of honor, something to boast about. Um, busyness is sort of a symbol of status, a signifier of importance. If you're not busy, um, you must not be all that important. But if you are busy, well then that must mean you matter. And when you think about it, this makes sense because we live in a culture where your self-worth is sort of attached to your productivity. How much you can do, how much you can achieve, how much you can accomplish. And so if our self-worth is sort of wrapped up and entangled with our productivity, well, it only makes sense that if we're constantly moving, constantly doing, constantly being productive, well, then that is obviously a signifier of how important you are. Which means the opposite is also true, right? If you don't, if you're not busy, well, you must not matter. You must not be that important. And so what ends up happening is we fill up our lives scurrying and frantically going from one thing to the next in order to feel significant like we matter, and we feel absolutely awful if we have nothing to do, right? Because there's this reinforced message that we must not matter, that we're irrelevant and unimportant. So you put this together, and I want to submit to you that hurry is actually built on the idol of productivity, but it's actually underneath it driven by deep insecurity. You see that? It's built on the idol of productivity. My self-worth is attached to how much I do, but underneath it is actually driven by a deep sense of insecurity. Even though it's become a badge of honor, and the exhaustion that comes with it is often a signifier that we emulate and admire. This is what led Augustine to say our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Right? If we're not resting in God, we end up living a restless life, scurrying around, trying to get worth from how much we can do. Here's what's concerning to me is that hurry has infiltrated the church. So we live in a culture of busyness, a culture that's held hostage by hurry. And as followers of Jesus, we're to live differently than the world around us. And yet, so far as I can tell, the church is assimilated to this culture of busyness. Followers of Jesus are hurrying around like everybody else. I'm actually convinced that this is one of the biggest threats facing us as a church. And when I say us, I mean like this church, cross point. Back in January, I led our leadership team and our staff through an exercise. It was a SWAT, uh pretty common tool. It's called it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And so we created some space to pray and to reflect, and we asked the question, God, what are our current strengths as a church? What are our weaknesses? What opportunities might you have for us in the future? And what are the current threats we're facing? Right? And I shared some of those results at the family forum. If you weren't here, we walked through all of those. But one of the threats that was at the top of the list for both the staff and the leadership team was busyness. There's sort of this realization that many people in our congregation, so us, we're living at a pace that gets in the way of our discipleship to Jesus, our ability to live life together as a community, and then to join God's mission in the world. Our busyness is blocking our ability to be faithful to God. Now, here's the worst part is that busyness isn't the root of the problem, it's a symptom. Underneath that busyness is actually disordered priorities. The reality is, this is the deepest threat, we're not prioritizing the things that matter to God. And you go, well, time out. I just have a lot of well, listen, let me just kind of prove my case. None of us are dying. You prioritize what matters. That's the truth. All of us do. We prioritize what matters to us most in life. Here's the proof: none of you have starved to death because you don't have time to eat. Somehow, you figure out every day how to eat, how to create time for that because you know it's essential. See what I'm saying? We make time for what's most important. And the reality is, is our priorities are totally jacked up. The moment you go, hey, no, no, no, I'm doing a good job, well, now we have to sort of interrogate how you're spending your time. And I bet what we'll discover is you're wasting copious times on your screens rather than spending time in the scriptures. The reality is we're prioritizing kids' sports over the things of the kingdom of God. We prioritize socializing over serving as the hands and feet of Jesus. We prioritize our physical health over our fitness in faith. And what happens when we get our priorities mixed up is that God gradually gets edged and pushed to the margins of our lives. And so does living together as followers of Jesus. So church becomes something that's optional rather than essential. Sort of an optional extra if I have time to engage. And I'll just name this is not how Jesus designed it to be. In the New Testament, there is no following Jesus apart from doing life with other people. Seeking first the kingdom of God is wrapped up with being part of a community where you're doing that with and alongside other people. And I'll just name this, not to pick on you young parents, but we have like a pretty uh sizable population of parents who have young kids. You look at our kids' ministry and it's booming. Here's my concern for you, as someone who's a little bit further ahead of you. In a few short years, your kids are going to be invited to have a ton of different opportunities to be engaged in different activities. Sports and, you know, extracurriculars. And if you're not careful, if you don't discern what place that has in the rhythms of your life together as a family, your life, your family's life will slowly shift from being centered and revolving around God and his kingdom to revolving around your kids' activities. And you'll God will get pushed to the margins as you get consumed with something other than God. It's something I'm deeply concerned about as one of your pastors. Here's how Michael Ziggorelli put it. He said, followers of Jesus have assimilated to a culture of busyness, hurry, and overload, which leads to a deteriorating relationship with God and causes Christians to become more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live. So what he's saying is the more you assimilate to this culture of hurry and busyness, the more you adopt that, the more God gets edged out or pushed to the margins in your life. But then the byproduct of that is when God is on the margins of your life, you become more susceptible to embracing all sorts of values that don't match the kingdom of God. While busyness is a badge of honor in our culture, I'm telling you it's not good for us on any level. I mean, physically, hurry is not good for you. There was a team of doctors in the 1970s that coined the phrase hurry sickness because they noticed a connection between the pace of life and heart disease. The more you hurry around, the more at risk you are of heart disease. It's not good for you physically. It's not good for you emotionally to be driven with that inner state of urgency, being consumed with fear and anxiety that you're not going to get it all done and that things are gonna fall apart. It's detrimental to our relationships. It's hard to be present to other people in love when we're rushing around. And it's certainly not good for us spiritually because we get untethered and decentered from the Spirit of God in our lives. So what's happening is we're skimming across the surface of our lives like little bugs, driven by hurry and hustle, and it's toxic for us. John Mark Comer said this: an over-busy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it's toxic. It's not good for us. In his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, uh, John Mark Comer, he includes 10 symptoms of what he of hurry sickness. 10 symptoms of hurry sickness. So if you're taking notes, if you got a little pen or paper, I'm gonna give you these ten symptoms. And what I want you to do is give yourself a rating for each one of these between one and ten. One being like, I don't struggle with this at all, this is a totally a non-issue for me. Ten being like, oh, that like describes me to a T. Alright? So here we go. Ten symptoms of hurricickness, rate yourself between one and ten. Irritability. Do you get mad, frustrated, or annoyed easily? One to ten. Hypersensitivity, number two. Do minor things quickly escalate into major emotional events? For example, a minor comment or an annoying email, and you become really reactive. Again, one to ten. Number three, restlessness. Do you have a hard time slowing down and relaxing? Or do you have to constantly be doing something even if it's just scrolling on your phone? Restlessness. Number four, workaholism. Do you have limits around and know when to stop working? Or do you find yourself not knowing when to or unable to stop? Workaholism. Number five, emotional numbness. Do you have the capacity to feel another person's pain? Or do you find yourself too tired and exhausted to feel or care? We're halfway there. Number six, out-of-order priorities. Do you feel disconnected from your identity and calling, sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, living reactively instead of proactively? Are you following God's calling in your life? Number seven, lack of care for your body. Do you have time for the basics? Working out, getting enough sleep, which is seven hours, by the way, seven to eight hours. Eating the right kinds of food. Are you practicing good self-care? One to ten. Escapist behaviors. Are you turning to distractions on a regular basis? Things like overeating, over-drinking, bidging Netflix, browsing social media? Escapist behaviors. Number nine, slippage of spiritual disciplines. Do you create regular time for prayer? Reading the scriptures, practicing Sabbath, attending church, engaging in community with other people. And lastly, isolation. Do you feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul? Here's the good news is that you can be completely honest. As you take an assessment like this, you can be completely honest because God already knows the answer to every one of those questions in your life. God knows you better than you know yourself. He knows you exhaustively, and he loves you perfectly. So no matter what the answers reveal, you don't have to dodge yourself. I took this assessment earlier this week and then shared it with our preaching team to see if they thought I answered it honestly. So here's the results. If you scored between one and 35, okay, so if you add up the totals from all of those questions and you scored 35 or under, you get a green light, which basically means, hey, you're managing hurry and busyness pretty well. Keep going. If you scored somewhere between 35 and 65, you get a yellow light. That means you're doing some things really well. Keep going on those, but there might be some things you need to adjust to lower and to slow down your pace of life. And if you scored 65 or over, uh, you need to pump the brakes. Okay, you get a red light. Stop what you're doing, reexamine the pace of your life and make some significant changes. Here's a key question I've been asking with each thing we need to take off throughout this series. If I were to keep living at this pace for the next 10 to 20 years, what kind of person will I become? So if you look at the last week, last month, last uh six months, and you ask the question if I were to keep living exactly how I'm living right now, what kind of character would I have in 10 to 20 years? What would my relationship with God, myself, and others look like? In other words, how is my pace of life shaping who I am? What's going on there? Now, now here's the deal, yo, friends. I know you have a lot of things to do. Because you're super important. I get it. Um I I feel like um as a pastor, as a husband with kids, and so on, I feel like I juggle a fair amount of responsibilities on the regular. I mean, because I'm important too, you know. Uh but but remember, busyness isn't the root of the problem. Okay, that's a symptom. The root of the problem has to do with our hearts, which is something Jesus is always inviting us to attend to. John Ortberg puts it this way: he says, hurry is not just a disordered schedule, hurry is a disordered heart. Hurry is sort of like, I like to think of it like this it's sort of like the dashboard, it's like a light on your the dashboard of your life. So when the hurry light comes on, uh the thing you need to do is actually pop the hood on your life and examine what's Going on, so that that light can go, so that that light can go off. Right? And so hurry is not first and foremost just a pace issue, it's actually a relational issue. Hurry compromises our relational connections. Many people have actually pointed out that hurry and sin have the exact same effect. They undercut our relationship with God, our relationship to ourselves, and with others. Hurry cuts off, it severs, it disconnects us from God. So let me kind of map out each one of those. Hurry is toxic to our life with God. When we get busy, God gets pushed to the margins, God gets edged out, and one of the first things we're likely to give up is spiritual practices and habits that actually keep us connected to God in the first place. I see some of you nodding. You can relate to this. I can relate to this. You guys, I'm like, I'm a professional Christian, I'm a pastor, and this happens to me all the time. I have a rule of life, a set of practices, spiritual habits that I'm committed to doing on the regular basis to stay tethered and connected and centered on God. One of those practices, which I've shared before, is known as the daily office. So sometime between 11 and 2, I pause from work to simply be with and connect with God for some amount of time. And I will tell you, this is one of the hardest practices for me to keep because when I'm in the middle of a really busy day and the to-do list feels like it's a mile long, stopping what I'm doing in order to sit, which feels like you're doing nothing, feels counterproductive. Right? I've got all this stuff to do. So if I stop to pray to be with God, well, that just means I have less time to do all these things. And so over the years I've noticed that when the to-do list is really long, the first thing to go, or at least I'm tempted to get rid of, is that daily office. And yet, that's actually what I need to do those things well. To be connected and centered on my life in Christ. Hurry is toxic to our life with God because it causes us to disconnect from God and it interrupts our connection with Him. Hurry is toxic to our relationship with ourselves. John Mark Comer says hurry is a form of violence to the soul. See, what happens is when you're hurried and you're rushed, you get disconnected from yourself. When you hurry and you rush, your autopilot kicks on. You're just responding to whatever's happening out here based on your natural responses that you've accumulated over the years, and you become less and less connected to what's actually going on inside of you. How you're thinking and feeling and processing the things that are coming at you. What's more is when you get hurried and rushed, one of the first things to go is all of your self-care habits. That's when we reach for the junk food rather than making healthy choices. That's when we skimp on our sleep rather than getting the necessary sleep that we need. It's when we stop exercising, even though that's the best stress reliever. When I call, when I have a monthly appointment with my therapist, you want to know the first question she asks me at the start of every session? How much sleep are you getting? What's your anxiety level at? How are you eating and are you exercising? Why? Because those are the first things to go when we're stressed out and anxious, rather than being like the staples that keep us healthy and centered. Hurry is toxic to our relationship with ourselves. It's also toxic to our relationship with others, and we know this. When we're hurried and frazzled, it's really hard to love the people around us well. Instead of being present to others and love, we become impatient with others out of self-importance. Hurry does bad work in our lives. So how do we take off hurry and begin to put on and practice presence? How do we stop living as hurricanes? Rushing around, causing damage to ourselves and to everything around us. Remember that hurry is not first and foremost a pace issue, it's a relational issue, which means that the solution to this hurry problem is also a relational one. It's not just focusing on your schedule or how fast you're moving. The solution is a relational pivot, and it's summed up in the word abiding. So here's our bottom line for today: practicing presence, which I've named as the opposite of hurry. Practicing presence is about being connected to God, to myself, and to others. Practicing presence requires exchanging striving for abiding. You want to fix the hurry problem in your life. It's centered on this word. Verse 4, Jesus said, Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me. I'm the vine, you're the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Hurry is not first and foremost a pace issue, it's a relational issue. It's not just a hustle thing, it's a heart thing. It's not just a margin problem, it's a trust problem. Here's what happens when we be we become hurried and anxious is we end up disconnecting from Jesus. We stop abiding. And here's what happens to me. When I start to hurry, I become disconnected from Jesus. And so now I'm no longer relying on Jesus, I have to rely on myself. And with that comes a ton of pressure. Because now I feel like I have to make things happen. I have to hold my life together. And so I start striving and scurrying, and I feel the full weight and pressure of getting it all done. I live life out of fear and in a frenetic and frantic way. And see, when I'm deeply connected to Jesus, when I abide, it changes everything. Because instead of me holding it all together, I can trust Jesus to hold it all together. I'm not self-reliant, I'm God-dependent. And as I'm dependent on God, God gives me everything I need to face the stuff that's happening in my life. You guys seeing the difference? When I'm not connected to Jesus, I strive. But when I'm connected to Jesus, I abide. Abiding is like the antidote to hurry and busyness, stress and overload. You want to fix hurry in your life? You want to fix busyness? It's about abiding in Jesus. Now here's the other thing is that when you abide in Jesus, you'll learn to live like Jesus. This is the whole point. When you learn to abide in Jesus, walk with Jesus in a connected way, you'll learn to live like Jesus. You will start to live your life just like Jesus lived his life. So let's consider for a moment, just a thought exercise. How did Jesus live his life? And let's put on the lenses of hurry and busyness for a moment. How do we see Jesus relating to pressures and demands and responsibilities in his life? And one of the first things you'll notice is this that Jesus walked at the pace of God's grace. This is why you'll never see Jesus sprinting through the Gospels. You'll never see him running from one place to another. There is no Jesus being frazzled or frenzied, scurrying or striving. He's not anxiously hustling. You don't see any of that in the New Testament. No evidence in the Gospels that Jesus is rushed. In fact, it's at the exact opposite. He simply walks at the pace of God's grace and love. And you go, okay, so what is that pace? Well, here's an interesting thought exercise. There was a Japanese theologian, Kazuki Koyama, who in the 1960s wrote a book called Three Mile an Hour God. And what he noticed is that the average human being walks three miles per hour. If you were to jump on a treadmill today and you just started walking your normal pace, you'd look down and the speed number would be somewhere around three. That is the average pace that most human beings walk. And when God took on flesh in Jesus, he walked at the pace of human beings. Change happens at the pace that's human-sized. And so what that means is that if we want to think about, hey, how fast does God move? How fast does love move? It's three miles per hour. God is patient and God is loving and God is slow. God walks slowly because God is loving, and hurry compromises love. Abiding in Jesus means adopting the pace of Jesus. When you abide in Jesus, you're going to learn to live at the pace of Jesus. And I'll just point out the obvious. The pace of our culture is antichrist. It's counter to the way of Christ. It's rushed. It doesn't have space for love or for grace. Abiding in Jesus will lead to walking with Jesus, which involves walking slow and unhurried, the pace of love and the pace of grace. So we look at the life of Jesus and we'll note that Jesus walked at the pace of God's grace. You'll also note that Jesus met with the Father no matter how full life got for him. Okay? I've already named my temptation, which is when life gets really full and super busy, my spiritual practices are under threat. They're under attack. Because that's one of the first things I'm tempted to let go of because I feel like I don't have time to do them. But see, with Jesus, it was the exact opposite. I mean that. It was the exact opposite. Jesus had plenty, really full days where he was going from sunup to sundown. And in those moments, he would often create extra intentional space to pull away from all the demands and responsibilities he had in order to be with his father in prayer, to connect with God. And the Gospels make a big point of this: that Jesus often withdrew to a quiet place. In Luke's gospel, it mentions Jesus going off to be in a quiet place with God nine times. Nine times. There's a great example of this at the beginning of Mark. After Jesus comes out of the wilderness, full of the Spirit, he jumps right into ministry. And there's this day where Jesus is going from start to finish, sunup to sundown, even past the sun going down, he's at it all day. And then we're told the very next morning he gets up before anybody else, goes to a place where nobody knows where he'll be to simply be with his Father, to connect. And so the principle for us is that when life, when when life picks up pace, when life picks up pace, time with God needs to become an even higher priority. Time with God, prayer should not be the first thing to go. It's the exact opposite. As the demands of life increased, prayer also needs to increase. The more that life with God actually needs to be prioritized, because just think about it. If I'm going to meet all the increased demands that are coming at me, that are bombarding me, I actually need the resources that I can only get from God through connection with God. And so that's why that connection becomes all the more important. I need God's wisdom, God's love, God's grace, God's discernment in order to take on all the challenges and demands that are coming at me. So we learn by abiding in Jesus, we learn to walk at the pace of God's grace. We learn how to prioritize life with the Father, no matter how busy life gets. And then finally, note this when you read through the Gospels, Jesus practiced presence by welcoming interruptions. Because Jesus walked at the pace of God's grace, because he was so connected with the Father and full of the Spirit, one of the things you'll notice is that no matter how demanding life was for Jesus, he was able to be present to the people right in front of him. He wasn't distracted by the future or the past. And one indicator of this is he often embraced interruptions. Jesus was interruptible. And not in like a oh squirrel type of way. Okay, that's not what I'm talking about. He wasn't distractable, he was interruptible. A great example of this, again, comes from Mark's gospel. There's a story where Jesus has been summoned and asked to attend to a 12-year-old girl who is sick and about to die. So note the urgency in that request. And Jesus says, yeah. And so he's on his way with his disciples. There's a group of people following him in order to see what he's going to do. And while he's on his way, a woman who has had bleeding, internal bleeding for 12 years comes up and in faith is like, if I can just touch his robe, I'll be healed. And she does, and she's healed. And everybody's like, you know, coming and close to Jesus. So who knows who touched her? But Jesus, what does he do? Instead of just continuing on, he stops. He asks, who did this? And then he has a moment with her where he attends to her deeply and affirms her faith. He's interrupted, even though there's like a crisis he's supposed to be attending to. He pauses and he becomes present to this woman, and then he continues on and ends up healing the little girl. How interruptible am I? Do I welcome the intrusions, the intrusions of other people? When people interrupt me, am I able to be truly present to them? Or I'm just like, get this interaction over with so I can get on to what I'm trying to do? Am I so consumed with my own schedule, my own to-do list, that I'm unable to make time for other people? When you abide in Jesus, you'll learn to live like Jesus. You'll learn to walk at the pace of God's grace. You'll learn the uh priority of attending to God even when life gets really busy, and you'll become uh uh interruptible being able to be present to other people. I'll confess to you, friends, I am not the most patient person. Um, and and if you were to go, hey, what does it look like to live uh uh unhurried uh three mile per hour life? I'm not the person you're gonna like shadow, okay? Um I'm kind of the exact opposite. I cram as much, like I'm a very motivated person. I've got things I love to do. I try to cram as much intentional effort into every day as I possibly can. And I actually have people around me that are like will flag me, they'll be when when I'm going too fast. And I don't wear that as a badge of honor. It's I'm a work in progress. Here's what I will tell you, and sometimes we can't, we we don't, we're not good at noticing God's work in our life in real time. It's sometimes only as we like look back that we realize, oh my goodness, God's been doing something here. I look back at where I was a decade ago, and I have grown so much in this area. And as I was preparing this sermon and asked, what was it? Like, why have I grown? Yes, it's been therapy, it's been all this stuff. But you want to know the number one thing that's helped me slow down my pace? Having a son with a disability. Because my son does not walk at three miles per hour, it's more like 0.3 miles per hour. He needs help with everything. From getting dressed in the morning to brushing his teeth to going to the bathroom, eating, all of it. There's very little he can do on his own. And so he needs help with everything and does everything very slowly. What's more is that he can sniff out impatience like that. And he gets really irritable if he notices that you're irritated. Case in point, just the other day, the bus shows up. I need to get his jacket on. He's kind of moving around, so I'm starting to get impatient, like the bus is waiting for us, and he goes, BAM, and pokes me right in the eyeballs. Don't rush me. So I'm like in this, like, I don't know, I'm really stuck because I have to move 0.3 miles per hour, and if I even try to speed it up to four, boom, right in the eyes. And yet it's so good for me. Walking at the pace of my son Griffin and loving him at that pace requires me to slow down way more than I'm comfortable with. And you know what, you guys, I I'm just gonna be honest. Many of us don't, we we like to serve people with disabilities. Like I'll I'll serve occasionally, or I'll create an environment in a public space where they're welcome, but most people don't have friends with people with disabilities. They're not like a regular part of our social circles, a regular part of our daily life, and we're missing out. Like our discipleship and the expansion of our hearts is being robbed by that. I long for this community to not only become a place of inclusion where people with disabilities can be invited and show up, but a place of belonging where we actually count them as family and friends. My son Griffin has lots of people that serve him every day in the school district. He has very few friends. Those are his family, that's it. So I'm suggesting we need to slow down, learn to walk at the rhythm of God's grace so that we can be deeply connected to God, aware of what's happening in ourselves, and present to others in love. Here's some questions you can pray through this week. Again, create time with Jesus and just reflect and ask Jesus to show you the answers to these questions. How fast am I moving through life right now? What does the pace of my life reveal about the state of my heart and my priorities? What are your priorities like these days? How is God inviting me to slow down and simplify my life around rhythms of abiding? Do you need a rule of life, a set of spiritual practices to help organize your priorities around life with God and others? And then here's your practice for this week. Remember, we don't grow just by listening. We've got to like respond, we've got to do something. Your primary practice this week is to take the hurry sickness assessment. So in just a moment, we're gonna put those questions on the screen. If you need to take a picture of each screen so you have it, it will also be on our website so you can access it there this week. But I encourage you to take the hurry sickness assessment, and then if you really want to go a step further, invite the people who know you best, go through each one with them and ask, hey, is this honest or do you see something different? Uh second practice for this week is to block off specific times to connect with Jesus at least once a day in at least 15 minutes. Block off time to connect with Jesus. And then the third practice, just because I couldn't help myself, is start befriending, befriend a person with a disability. Befriend a person with a disability. Alright, so let's put the screenshot. You guys can each take a picture if you need. Here's the hurry sickness assessment, along with the description of each one. So we've got irritability, hypersensitivity, and restlessness. You can take a picture of that if you need. Workaholism. And then we can go to the next slide, and we'll make sure you guys can get all of that down. Um while you're doing that, Easter is next week. We have two services, standard times, but I would encourage you to be praying about who to invite. I was really inspired by a couple at our church last week. Last last weekend we had um Easter jam. And this family invited five other families who all attended for the very first time, and then hosted lunch for them at their house afterwards. And I just thought, man. That's so encouraging for them to be thinking about the relational networks outside of, you know, here in their everyday life. And many of them are looking for a church home. So just be aware of those people in your life. And if Jesus prompts you to make that invite, do a good job hosting them. Yeah? All right. Let's stand, and I'd love to pray for us. Um, Jesus, we need to be freed. We can't do it ourselves. We need to be uh freed from this bondage of busyness. Um we're held hostage by hurry, and we need you to free us. So would you loosen the chains and would you teach us how to abide in you deeply that we might fall deeper in love with you and then love our neighbors as ourselves? This is what you've called us to do. And so, by your grace, do what you can do in our lives and help us to be attentive to it and surrender to it in love. For we ask that in Jesus' name, Amen. Go in peace.