A special blog by Author and friend, Tom Allen.
I missed a holiday celebration not long ago, and I seem to be the only one who wasn’t told about the special occasion. One recent Tuesday was evidently National Pull Out in Front of Tom Day, and numerous people-in-the-know enthusiastically observed it during my morning commute.
As I headed downtown, several drivers decided that there was easily enough clearance in front of me to mosey out of their side streets into my lane, seemingly oblivious to the screech of my brakes. It was so unreasonable the first time or two that I had to laugh, but I actually ended up pretty close to fuming by the time I got to the office.
It brought back visions of another equally lovely day further back when I attempted to grab a few bucks from an ATM. There was only one car ahead of me, and the woman driving seemed to have the hang of the whole computerized process because as I pulled in behind her, I heard lots of beeps as she diligently tapped the screen. The ATM then spit her card back out, and I prepared for her to move on.
Instead, she re-inserted the card and started tapping again. This process repeated itselfseveral times as a few minutes crawled by: a long series of beeps and the reappearance of her card. As I began a short deep breathing exercise, she literally got out of her car, walked around in front of mine, opened her trunk, and spent a couple more minutes rummaging around in it for something. I couldn’t believe it.
I hit the gas, pulled around her and bolted.
Why the dramatic jump in blood pressure on both those days? Was there really somewhere so important I needed to be that I just couldn’t abide the interesting driving and ATM habits of my fellow humans? What, exactly, was the rush?
I seem to have acquired a need for speed, along with just about everyone else I know. Pastor and author John Mark Comer says that we’ve become accustomed (addicted, really) to fast and easy—but that the best stuff in life is often slow and difficult. The apostle Paul, in his celebrated and often-quoted Biblical passage about love, begins with “Love is patient…” James, the brother of Jesus, wrote that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”
It takes time to cultivate a way of being that is slower, more deliberate, thoughtful, and patient. The kind of character I’m hoping to develop doesn’t just happen automatically as the years go by. It’s a committed pursuit of living by the ideals we say are most important to us. And, I believe, it entails surrender, admitting to God that our efforts alone aren’t going to get us there.
When it comes to other people, there’s not a lot I can truly be certain of. Maybe the woman at the ATM could have used a hand with whatever she was looking for in the trunk. Maybe the folks cutting into traffic were late for something they were desperate to be on time for. Maybe I need to be more open to what’s going on in the lives of those whose lives intersect with mine, even when it’s unlikely I’ll ever see them again.
Part of the solution seems so simple, as many of the best answers often do. Both the commute on that Tuesday and the wait at the ATM would have felt a lot different if I could get better at easing off life’s gas pedal. An old Finnish proverb I stumbled across recently says, “God did not invent hurry.”
I think the Finns are on to something.
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