[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrH5j5kHC28]

“Slow down, you move too fast. You’ve got to make the morning last. ”

-Simon and Garfunkel

We just move too fast and are too busy to stop and see how God is here amongst us. Take a breath. Take a moment.  Watch this YouTube video (compliments of Simon) about slow motion cameras. Notice the beauty we miss out on, because we simply move to fast to notice it.

Where is the beauty in your life that you’ve missed? Where is the Lord moving or speaking, that’s you’ve been too busy to notice or hear?

Let us not miss the beauty of the moment in the pursuit of busyness. Too often I treat the day like a race to be finished. I get to the end of the day and begin again the next day. There’s no beauty in that. There’s no life. Every breath, every moment from God is a gift. Let us relish in this gift and not miss out. Take a breath. Take this moment. Ponder the life we’ve been given.

“When one continually digests everything dished out by religious leaders, government, and big business, they may find they’re unable to make a decision without getting someone else’s input first.” Jerome

In the flawed baseball movie, For the Love of the Game, pitcher Billy Church (played by Kevin Costner) would step on the mound and be surrounded by so many sounds, sights, and pressures. He would look at his catcher, trying to focus and then say to himself, “Clear the Mechanism.” And in amazing movie magic, all sound would go away and his focus would return. Now in the silence he was ready to pitch.

Sometimes I think that we live with too much noise. And that noise doesn’t serve any good purpose. As christians, we try to make sure our noise is good noise, but it’s still noise. In ministry, we try to say it’s godly noise, but it’s still noise.

Why is it so hard for us to ‘clear the mechanism’ and be quite before the Lord?  Why do we make life all about the noise? The noise only leads to stress, busyness, anxiety and more noise. We make it about the noise, where all God is calling us to do is ‘be still and know that I am God.’

Let us be a people who pursue silence.

After reading this quote from Jerome, really got me thinking. Why aren’t we driven by seeking the Lord and reading the Bible anymore? We get wrapped up in the noise. It’s deafening. It makes it seem like we’re consumed by the thoughts of other

I meet every Tuesday morning at 6am with 3 other guys for breakfast and Bible study. We always sit in the same booth at Don’s diner. I’m always half awake till I dive into my bottomless cup of diner coffee. So, I drug in this morning and walked over to our regular booth and was about to sit down till I noticed that there was someone else in my booth. From behind (and through my bleary eyes) it looked just like one of my breakfast mates. But upon closer look, it sure wasn’t Alan. It was the wrong guy. Luckily, I stopped just before sliding into the booth with a chipper”Good morning!” I’m sure the guy would have appreciated the greeting, but he wasn’t who I was looking for. The other guys laughed at me from across the room as they watched this unfold.

How often do we get caught up in routines and regularity of life and miss where we are going? I was pointed in the right direction. I was walking towards what I though was my destination. And when I arrived there it wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was led more by routine than vision.

I find myself doing this more than I like to believe. I get on cruise control and take my eyes off the road. It says in Lamentations 3:40, “let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”

So is it just me? Or do you find yourself speeding though the day, simply trying to get to the end, but not looking where you are going? And at the end of the day, I look in the mirror and find myself not being the man I set out to be. My vision has been lost. I’ve become busy. I’ve become stressed. I’ve become tired. I’ve become the wrong guy.