Come sit awhile

I'm fed up with the busyness of life: but not with the type of busyness where I am committed, invested, and intensely engaged. 

Instead, I'm fed up with busyness where a thousand and one things are demanding my attention, where I am ever contactable, where expectations are that I respond immediately.

Hey!  It's my life, won't you get out it of for a moment!

The problem is that life is relationship.  But to develop relationship I need time.

Even more critical, my relationship with God's spirit is more important than any human relationship, because that is the one where all relationships begin.

In the same way a human relationship develops over time, so as we deepen our relationship with the Spirit, that takes time. I want to deepen my relationship with God's spirit.  Because I want God in my life.

It is incredible arrogance that I expect God to respond to my requests when I don't spend time building my relationship with him.  Now granted, in his grace his Spirit does sometimes break through despite myself.  However, the normative process is that as I deepen my relationship the Spirit becomes more and more an inherent part of my life, part of me.  And then he is in me, and I in him, and he brings his gifts, his power, his love.  But the relationship comes first.

Come and sit awhile ... Mark 6:31 And he said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while."  For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat."   This verse almost sounds like the disciples had mobile phones, ipads, email, and twitter and they needed to escape.

I was reminded of this again in reading Gal 5:  Paul points out that our identity is not found in the formulae of our life's routines. Instead he says our identity is "but only faith working through love."  Faith is rooted in relationship.  As we depart from the formula of religion and invest instead in the relationship with the Spirit, there we find his presence.

So it remains my conviction that we give our time disproportionately to the formulae of religion, work, and societies rituals ... our time is expended on fulfilling expectations and obligations.  We do all this at the expense of spending time with God the Father, Spirit, Son. 

And for our faith, our community life in churches across the world: What might this mean if we were to spend together with God in the right proportion to the time we spend together about God?

Julie Meyer has a wonderful take on this, about "Come sit awhile": ow.ly/lGYrW

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