God is not in a hurry

"I feel a burning desire to preach the Gospel, but I know in my heart that now is the time to pray, to read, to meditate, to be quiet, and to wait... It makes no sense to preach the Gospel when I have allowed no time for my own conversion. I feel a tension within me. I have only a limited number of years left for active ministry. Why not use them well? Yet one word spoken with a pure heart is worth thousands spoken in a state of spiritual turmoil. Time given to inner renewal is never wasted. God is not in a hurry."
--Henri Nouwen

He's right. It does not make any sense at all to preach the Gospel when we have allowed no time for our own conversion. And yet: why do we order our lives in so many other ways?

One word spoken with a pure heart is worth a thousand spoken in a state of spiritual turmoil. Ah, but our words seem to have power nonetheless--they really do seem to have the power to fix other people's turmoil, even if spoken from a spirit of turmoil themselves. I can be utterly spent, but can still get things done--sermon series planned, people counseled and prayed for, blurbs written, budget recorded. That's the dilemma for us: things can get checked off of our list whether or not they were completed with a pure heart full of an awareness of God's love.

Compounding that dilemma is this one: if we make the courageous decision to set apart time and space to allow God to purify our hearts, well, some things don't get checked off the list that could have. The hour of my day that I spent listening, praying, reading, being silent, journaling, in solitude, etc., could have been spent doing something else that needed to be done--and still needs to be done. And that something else usually has a someone else behind it, perhaps secretly angry or disappointed with you for not getting it done (or so we imagine them to be). And really when you get down to it, maybe it's just not worth all of the trouble to let God purify your heart and in so doing purify your service. Maybe it's better to just keep checking as many things off of the list as possible each and every day. People seem to be happier when that happens. And you know what, we might be happier with that ourselves.

We're happier with that because everything is utterly in our control. I had that on my list, I planned a way to complete it, I executed my plan, and now it's off of my list. It wouldn't have disappeared from my list had I not completed it, had I not intervened, had I not called, had I not prepared, had I not preached, had I not had that appointment, had I not been at that meeting. Turns out I'm pretty important to the world continuing to turn. Critical even.

But the happiness from being the center of the world is only short lived, because as it turns out, we can only sustain being at the center for so long without feeling tired, spent, dried up, unappreciated, resentful, angry, bitter, taken for granted... you fill in the blank. Gradually the bliss of being needed wears down, and the ache of being used sets in.

And you wonder: do I really matter all that much? Is it so significant that I kill myself getting things done every moment of every day?

And in quietness, we realize that it is true: one word spoken from a pure heart is worth thousands spoken from a life in turmoil.

Not just to those to whom we speak them. But to our own souls as well.