Pastor's Page
From the Pastor
The day we entered the season of Lent, I read an article from Dr. Sean Tobin, a charismatic-Catholic and a clinical psychologist. In this article he made this statement: Another season of the world moving faster than our nervous systems were designed to process. The world is not slowing down. But the Church is. That tension is worth sitting with.
As we spend more time with our spiritual lives, we pray, read, and even sing a little more and give time to the faith that we see as important in our lives while the world around us just gets faster. Tobin says that even if we do not use “tech” it affects us because we absorb what the culture is producing. By producing more stuff and more urgency we lose our capacity to pause—and therefore the capacity to discern.
I feel this and see this around me every day with people hearing something and then taking to the internet and sharing their feelings. My training for conflict mediation worked on listening more than talking. Listening to what someone is saying is the only way we can understand the people around us. Taking a pause is not what the world around us wants us to do, the world wants us to Go, Go, Go, and then go a little more. With all this acceleration we do not have time to look at the things around us that are taking our freedom and ability to learn from each other.
Much like Jesus, we are taking 40 days to reflect, discern, and just slow down. There is no one thing that you are to do in this Lenten season, it is a time for you to take time for you, a time to relax, exercise, stop doing something that you need to take a break from, or just taking time to read the book that has been on your list to read. Too often we get trapped by something we feel we must do, I am asking you to not feel trapped in the days left in this Lenten season. Enjoy the time and take time to gather with the ones you love and want to spend time with.
March can be the time we pump the brakes and listen, read, pause, and discern what is happening in our lives and of those around us. Slow down and take time to be the best that you can be. Unlike the world around us we in the church take time to slow down, let us enjoy this change of pace.
Peace & Love
Allen Kahler, Pastor