By Sean Miller
At our staff meeting this week, I read a poem called “A Summer Prayer” by the Rev. Ted Loder. I have read this poem many times and in many different settings, but this time, one line in particular stood out:
Let this season be for me
A time of gathering together the pieces
Into which my busyness has broken me
Several years ago, when I was an associate pastor for youth ministries in a large congregation outside Chicago, I was meeting with a group of youth leaders and planning our calendar for the school year. We were lamenting how difficult it was to get youth to attend events during the week, because of sports schedules and homework, and that Sunday mornings are no longer days of rest. I was complaining about the administrative burdens of ministry and how I wished I had “more time,” but that I was always “too busy.”
In the middle of the meeting, one of our youth leaders interrupted my complaining and said, “Why do ministers stand in the pulpit and talk about Sabbath, and then complain about not having enough time? You have all the time you need. It is how you choose to spend it that is killing you.”
He was right.
John Calvin once described human beings as “a factory full of idols.” Calvin meant that human beings have a propensity for the worship of anything—anything except for God, who gives us life so that we might worship. Instead, we worship other people, we worship ourselves, we worship political ideologies, and, for most of the year, we worship busyness. We would rather be busy than sit still. We feel “unproductive” when we aren’t multitasking, and we feel like we should be doing more when we aren’t in constant locomotion. A good day is when we have gotten a lot done. A bad day is when we have much that is left undone.
But as the poem suggests, at some point, and usually at different points along the way, that busyness breaks us. We respond to the brokenness wanting a vacation. But what we need is more than that.
What we need is to give ourselves daily permission to be still. Still. Even saying the word “still” out loud causes us to pause. Summer begs for stillness. Stillness is not unproductiveness, nor is it is laziness. Stillness is a quiet of spirit, a centering—it is feeling our feet on the ground, listening to our heartbeat. Gratitude for our heartbeat. Gratitude for our children. Gratitude for our neighbors. Stillness pushes back against our culture, which says “time is money” and “there are not enough hours in the day.” There are enough hours in the day. God made the earth rotate at exactly the right speed.
So, I plan on working hard this summer, and I also plan on working hard at stillness. Because for nine months out of the year, we squeeze every ounce of “productivity” out of the day that we can find, often to a breaking point. But the summer begs us to gather together the pieces. Because God has given you all the time you need, as another poet wrote many generations ago: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
The Rev. Sean Miller is senior minister at First Presbyterian Church of Greenwich.
