The Slow Pace of Faith

My husband has described me as “a bull in a china shop.” While I resist this description and look for ways to prove it false, I must embrace another cliché, “if the shoe fits, wear it.” What fits is that I know what I want, and I want it now – this could be clean carpet, freshly ironed clothes, or a family fun day. I have grand ideas of self-improvement; embark on these demands full of energy and good intentions only to quickly run out of steam. The same fifteen pounds has made itself home in my body for the last ten years. Even now, as I chew away on a celery stick, I am conflicted with the thought that this health kick shall quickly fade away. And then I face my failure, my lack of discipline, my disappointment in myself (not too mention the chubs remaining on my body.)

At times of anxiety and stress, I demand perfection from myself. I expect that I should be super-woman. I should be able to grow vegetables, have nutritious meals, read books to my children every night, write love notes to my husband, comfort friends when they are troubled, feed the homeless . . . I should be able to do it all right now, at this season of life. Reality – my kids eat cheeseburgers and French fries and the garden flopped. Many nights, at the end of the day I am out of patience and long for the children to be quiet and go to sleep. Once the disappointment passes, I am reminded of a nun who had a sign over her doorpost, “I shall not should on myself.”

I want perfection in the physical realm as well as in my spiritual life. I want regular time for contemplation and meditation; I want connection with creation, passion that never fades, and my human deficiencies to be erased. I am coming to realize that I approach faith and the process of being made holy much like that bull in the china shop – I run after it with full zeal, only to realize that in my haste for perfection I have trampled upon the treasures.

Faith is a marathon, not a sprint. To approach it too quickly and demand instant results is to ignore the treasures along the way. To step into that which makes us anxious and uncomfortable is not popular. I do not hear people saying, “Oh yeah, I get to feel awkward and various emotional pains!” On the contrary, if you are anything like me, you will try anything to skip over the difficult emotions and experience the victory of the finish line. But the difficult is where we are met with our human condition – our vices, short-coming, yearnings, and passions. In the difficult, we find our needs and the Source of our fulfillment.

Faith is a slow meandering journey. We are meant to stop, look, examine, analyze, and pursue perfect intimacy with our Creator. When we allow ourselves to take the slow path, we enter the lifetime journey of coming to know the True Self, the self created in the image of God. It is a path that never ends, but around each bend are new details to behold and new dynamics to grasp. When we allow our anxiety and avoidant behaviors to rush us past discomfort, we miss the point of the journey. We find more of our false self and its many layers of unrealistic demands and traps of self-deceit. We miss opportunities to know God and willingly be known in return.