What's Next

This summer has been different. Things usually, at least for the last fourteen years have slown down. There has been time between activities, meetings, crises. The have to’s haven’t been packed in against each other. There has been room to breathe, to water the garden, to paint the porch, to listen to the birds.
This summer has been different. Each day resembles the one before, an adventure in shuffling priorities, triage at its best, or worst. I would assign this to my advancing chronological development, creeky knees to boot, but other people are having a hard time fitting in the meetings that I need to have with them because they’ve got too much to get done this week. What about next? No, wait…. It ain’t just me.
I called a Pastor’s office the other day, to get the names of people on a committee I’m chairing. Gotta set up a meeting. He was on vacation. I said, “Oh, good.” His Ad. Min. told me I could e-mail him, he would be back to me within twenty four hours. “But he’s on vacation.” “Well,” she said with some sadness in her voice, “he took his blackberry.”
I heard a lecture by a professor on technology. He’s an expert on oil extraction. He said our technology, what we have invented is out beyond our ability to manage it. We’ve got toys that we can’t handle. They’ve evolved faster than we have. Thus blow outs in the Gulf. But I think we’ve got blow outs a lot closer to home. We think we need to be connected. To what? We’ve got so much coming in all the time, we have no place to stand that is not pulsing with stuff that we ‘have to’ deal with, emotionally, logistically, spiritually.
If we are to be human, we can’t be servants of our machines, or the multiple agendas of others. We need places and times, UN-connected. We need to claim some silence. We need to listen to the languages of the earth and the whispers of the wind. We need to be quiet long enough to hear God’s still small voice.
I think I’ll cancel a few things and go paint the porch.