On Waiting and Moving

On Waiting and Moving

It seems a paradox that I want patience and movement at the same time. One of my favorite phrases is “let’s proceed with deliberate haste.” The tension between motion and stillness, patience and drive is held in that phrase and also (for me) in my faith.

The word combination “deliberate haste” may have come from Abraham Lincoln, when asked whether he favored the immediate emancipation of slaves, quoted the Latin motto festina lente: "make haste slowly." This expression, attributed to the emperor Augustus, found its English counterpart long before Lincoln: Ben Franklin, that proverb-meister, put "make haste slowly" into Poor Richard's Almanac in 1744. (credit to William Safire for the word play)

In the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered school segregation to be abolished "with all deliberate speed." A decade later, Justice William Brennan commented on the progress following the decision: "There has been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed. The time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out."

Both Lincoln and Brennan used the phrase to describe a cultural situation that was unbearable.  The suggestion was that action needed to be taken, but the right action. Wisdom, but wisdom with forward motion.

Last Sunday, we sang a song in church and perhaps it was the passion of the worship team or perhaps the lyrics just penetrated my heart, but I was moved.  The song was “Spirit of the Living God” and some of it goes like this

Spirit of The Living God
Spirit of The Living God
We Only Want To Hear Your Voice
We’re Hanging On Every Word 

Because When You Speak, When You Move.
When You Do What Only You Can Do
It Changes Us, It Changes What We See And What We Seek

It changes us. It changes our priorities. It makes us uncomfortable with the status quo, similar to the desire to correct the injustice of slavery. Lincoln wanted to free those enslaved by humans. We want to see freedom for the spiritual captives.

Several years ago, Susan Ashton had a similar lyric

Oh but you move me
You give me courage I didn't
Know I had
You move me on
I can't go with you
And stay where I am
So you move me on

So here is my confession.  I am driven to study. I don’t want to be unprepared when I preach or teach the word.  However, I am convicted that if I, as an introvert, see being with people as a distraction, pulling me away study and preparation time, I have missed the point of preaching. I cannot neglect the study of the Word, but I cannot neglect people either. One preacher said, “I have to be spending as much time with the living human documents as I am with the printed documents and the commentaries. They feed each other, both are central.”

Jesus seemed to get this. He was aware that he was experiencing His last night on earth, His last moments before intense suffering, and His last season as incarnate Messiah made flesh. Yet, in Gethsemane, He told the disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” In a few verses, the Passion began.

So I need to move with deliberate haste. I want to be with people, hear their hurts, see their pain, pray through their fears. But I also want to seek what God’s Word says about it, and dive into God’s presence to the point that I have to be where HE is working, have to be where HE is moving, have to use the Words HE has spoken to speak in the excitement of the moment with the congregation of Dunwoody Baptist Church, the amazing people to whom God has trusted me to minister.

I can't go with you
And stay where I am
So you move me on