Over the last week or two, I have simply felt exhausted. Holy week certainly did not help with two separate funerals and five other services to attend to throughout the week. Combine any other personal chores, activities, or any other thing that needs doing and the week feels ever more like a train wreck. In reality, everything worked out okay and the world did not implode at any point, but the reality is that those kinds of moments in our lives when we feel the overwhelming amount of work to do, whether it is multiple services, tax deadlines, finals week, preparation for family gatherings or otherwise, the overwhelming force of everything really hits you hard.
In seminary, I had a professor by the name of Andrew Root who often cited that part of the issue of our society in any given moment is the problem of “acceleration.” In a podcast episode of For the Life of the World, Dr. Root commented: “For the most part, the modern project is just year after year upping the dial of acceleration. We see it with technology within social change, and then also with just the pace of our lives. Busyness does give us an immediate kind of sense of living a full life, but it is a kind of hollow fullness, I think, which is what this whole thing is about. It’s that stripping time of any of its sacred weight, so it can go fast. But then when you’re forced to slow down a little bit, you realize that there’s a kind of frightening hollowness to it.”[1] By not taking the time to slow down and to process or savor what life has to offer, we end up removing all value or meaning from the activity itself. Even times like Holy Week can feel like just another thing to check off the list of activities so we can move on to more important things.
I needed a reminder, and I hope it helps you too, that many times in our lives we need to take the time to slow down. To live in the moment that we happen to find ourselves in. Whether joyful, sorrowful, or otherwise. Each moment of our lives can bring about fulness of so many wonderful and marvelous things. Even when we do not realize it. So today, I’ll leave you simply with this. Take a moment to breathe, to live into sabbath rest, and know that God will continue to make the world spin around at the same pace as it always had before. We don’t need to make the world spin any faster than it already is. God bless you and keep you all!
[1] Andrew Root. “Time, Acceleration, and Waiting: YCFC.” Yale Center for Faith and Culture | at Yale Divinity School, 2024. https://faith.yale.edu/media/time-acceleration-and-waiting.
Pastor Evan Meester, May 2026
