A Snail's Pace

Dear Burke UMC Friend,

My current favorite joke is about two snails that were standing on the side of the road. A turtle stopped and said, "Do you guys want a ride on my back"? One of the snails took him up on his offer and off they went.

As the turtle reached the intersection, another turtle came along and crashed into him. The poor little snail was thrown and killed. A cop investigating the accident began questioning the dead snail's buddy. "Did you see it? What happened?" he asked.

The little snail replied, "I don't know, it just all happened so fast."


So it is sometimes with the ways of God. One of the lessons I learn from history - cosmic history, world history, Christian history - is how large the canvas is on which God paints. It is immense, stretching through eons of time, with each brush stroke moving at its own pace but rarely at a speed which our eyes can detect.

God surely answers prayer - it's just often at what we might call a snail's pace. "When will the job come through? How long before I meet someone? When will my heart stop hurting? What's the purpose, God, behind all this waiting? How long?" No one has answers to these questions.

It nearly always takes longer than we want before the answers come, before the new image begins to emerge. Then we understand that God's silence is not God's absence. God has been working all along, it just happens at a snail's pace. And it's the journey itself that's the goal, not just the arriving.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a seeking soul,
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Enough of life comes at breakneck speed. Live the questions now. God may be slow, but He's always right on time!


Grace and peace,

Pastor Larry