Speed

This week-end I am starting a three part sermon series titled, "Disciplines for a Busy World." It's my attempt to remind myself that there are some counter-cultural practices that the church has utilized for centuries that help keep us focused on life through Jesus when the world all around us offers what appears to be life through everything else. There are a ton of things that I could cover, but I've chosen to limit the series to...

• Sabbath
  
• Solitude and Silence
  
• Simplicity

Why only three?   Because we need to approach these ideas slowly.  More isn't always better. As I have been poking around in my own heart I have been reminded just how counter-cultural these disciplines are, even within what I would call the evangelical Christian sub-culture. 

Sabbath sets itself up against busyness, even busyness for good reasons.  It's not just going to church on Sunday, it's a conscious decision to let things stop for a day in order to remind ourselves that the success of the Universe (or our local Christian body or even my own spiritual life) has more to do with God than it does with me.  He asks us to stop in order to break our momentum.  To remind us that it's His work and not ours.  Solitude and Silence helps us to listen.  A strange idea for the iPod and internet generation.  And simplicity says that less is more.  Something I am reminded of when I see the fact that my stuff owns me instead of the other way around.

What motivated this series?  Primarily my own sense of lostness and desire to be refocused. Pastoring can be too busy at times and I find that I wrestle with what I call "people fatigue". I think that I am not alone in this.  While Jesus calls us to open up our hearts to people we are often so busy that we just don't want to surrender to that call.  Of course, there's always this option...

Are you there, God? It's me, the Internet.

Prayer has gone digital with help from a new web service that allows people to outsource their holy communication to a computer. On Information Age Prayer, the faithful simply choose their preferred passages and a text-to-speech synthesizer gives voice to them at regular intervals, for a nominal fee.

Available e-prayers include Our Father, for Christians, the Fajr, for Muslims and, for the agnostic, a prayer for financial health — which ironically will set users back about $53 annually. "I don't make any particular claims about efficacy, but I do believe that God is omniscient and He will hear (the prayers)," says creator James Mcarlos, who describes himself as spiritual but not religious. "Whether He listens or not is really a reflection of the subscriber."

The 23-year-old Bostonian says he designed the pay-per-prayer site for people like himself "who don't have time to put in the effort they'd like, to pray." (Read more at Digital Prayers)

As it says in the video below, we are living in exponential times.  Life is moving faster than ever before.  But honesty calls us to admit that just because it's faster doesn't mean it's better - especially when it comes to our spiritual life.