60 Seconds – A Slow Hurry

The late Jamie Buckingham related, “I grew up under the tutorage of a wonderful old Southern ‘black mammy’ named Willie Mae McGriff. She was an intimate part of our family for more than thirty years. It was she who taught me the art of being in what she called a ‘slow hurry.’ There were mornings when she arrived at our house moving slow. My mother, who was hyper, and sometimes demanding, would push her a little. I remember Willie Mae’s delightful response: ‘Don’t worry ‘bout that, Miz B. I’ll get it done. Today I’s just movin’ in a slow hurry.'”

In Psalm 46:10, the Lord says, “Be still and know that I am God.” This is a prescription for living that not many follow in these days of hurry and rush. Pascal wrote, “One of the ways in which man brings the most trouble upon himself is by his inability to be still.”

In her article The Immediate And The Ultimate, Alice Reynolds Flower wrote, “Two words we may well consider – immediate and ultimate. Much of our thinking and praying is for immediate results. We want the answer now! In God’s vocabulary, there is another word – ultimate. ‘For I know the thoughts I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end’ (Jeremiah 29:11). He is the God of the near and the far; of the immediate and the ultimate. Time can be inconsequential with Him in fulfilling His purposes, for His working is beyond our perspective, beyond our limited understanding.”

Someone wisely reminds us, “God may stretch your patience to enlarge your soul.” Psalm 27:14 exhorts, “Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen our heart; wait, I say, on the Lord!” Dr. Wayland Hoyt illustrated this with the following story: “They have preserved in Bedford, England, the door of the gaol which locked upon John Bunyan. I looked at it long and earnestly. I thought of the many prayers which Bunyan must have pleaded behind it,that that gaol door might swing open for him. Yet, for twelve years, the bolts of that door stood undrawn. But the delay was affluently fruitful. Dreams were going on behind that door, and the world needed them. When the Pilgrim’s Progress of which Bunyan dreamed had taken shape and tangibility, Bunyan’s Lord, who had never for an instant forgotten him while the slow years passed, swung that gaol door wide. Let us give God time.”

Phillip Brooks: “I’m in a hurry, but God isn’t.”