Holy Hesitation
“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires.”
Our world values quick emotions. Reactive explosions of thought and opinion. Loud rallies behind this or that political protest.
If you’re not loud and reactive, you don’t care.
Or so the world says.
The more I read the contemplatives and spend time in Scripture, the more I am convinced that we need a slower life. John Mark Comer wrote a whole book on this, called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry; even the title inspires you to stop and pause, to consider how you might slow that anxious, hurried pace in your life.
What would life be like if, instead of hurrying from one thing to the next, instead of reacting in anger or outrage to every news article or rallying behind every celebrity influencer on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram—what if we stopped?
My church staff team is currently reading Who Moved My Pulpit? by Thom Rainer, in which the main topic is, “How do we as a church respond to change?” When changes happen, as they inevitably do, how the leaders implement or respond to that change is the primary factor in whether the change will be accepted and successful among the congregation. His first advice in beginning change is to Stop… and Pray.
Ah, prayer, that elusive practice that promises intimacy with God and yet feels outside of our grasp. What is prayer? How do we even do prayer? Our logical, rationally trained Western minds struggle to understand the mystery of prayer. We can’t see God, after all, not with our physical eyes. And we can’t hear God, not with our physical ears.
It seems an exercise in hopelessness. A practice for those who are either far too pious for their own good or those who are toeing a psychological break.
What does prayer do?
Yes, that’s also a problem, because prayer doesn’t accomplish anything when we are sitting on our living room chairs or prayer closets, or doing a prayer walk, or even when we try kneeling on creaking joints or evoke wells of tears.
Thus, we arrive at a vast cultural misunderstanding of prayer.
I’m being cynical here for good reason, so bear with me. All these thoughts have crossed my mind at one time or another as I have wrestled with the purpose and practice of prayer.
These days, my prayers rarely take the form of words. Sure, I write in my journal, almost obsessively, but spoken prayer is a shiny unicorn in my personal time with God. My prayers more often take the form of silence, which is to say that they don’t take form at all and instead are simply the practice of being with God.
Prayer is stillness. Prayer is slowing. Prayer is being with God and acknowledging his presence with me. Prayer is gently lifting to God the person that comes to mind, releasing them to Him—yes, even without words.
Prayer settles me in my deepest self, in that center of the labyrinth where I meet with God, where He sees my soul and does not flinch and instead says, “Child, I love you.”
Prayer is returning to my Creator, the one who understands me completely, and in Him, I am found.
When the world is angry and loud (because let’s be honest, it’s rarely not angry and loud), prayer grounds me in who He is and who He made me to be. It’s a discipline, for sure. It takes effort to stop, to withdraw into the desolate places for a while to pray and be with my Father so that I can parse the voices of the world from the voice of my soul and the voice of God.
This sorting of voices can only happen in holy hesitation. Clarity can only be reached when we stop and pray. Wisdom is that practice of retreating from the clamour—not forever, just for a time—so that we can hear Truth and Love more clearly and then re-engage with our family, friends, congregation, co-workers, and neighbours in a slow and settled way, an oasis in a world of anger.
