The Pace of Grace

Get away with me and you'll recover your life.... Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.... Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

Matthew 11:28–30 MSG

The bell rang on the first day of school and the students began filing in. Excited chatter mixed, with sighs of resignation, floated from the hallways into the makeshift classroom of a temporary building. I had no idea the administration had given me such a big class for first period, I thought. I need to make sure I have enough material to keep all these kids busy or the next fifty minutes are going to be a disaster! When I looked down at my desk, I came to the devastating realization that I had left my lesson planner and all of my materials at home. I panicked and my mind went blank. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to teach. How would I make it through the day with no lesson plans?

If you have ever been a high school teacher, you will understand what I'm about to say. High school students are wild creatures. They detect unpreparedness the way a shark smells blood. They can sniff it out a mile away, and when they do, they go in for the kill. They will gather in packs. They will mark you as prey, and they will circle you, looking for a moment of weakness. When they find it, they will strike quickly, mercilessly, and relentlessly. You will bleed out hall passes and discipline slips until you are dry, and at the end of the day the janitor will sweep your depleted body off the floor with the pencil dust and little paper circles from the three-hole punch. As a teacher, my greatest ally is my lesson plan book. I had left mine at home, and now I was cast adrift in a hostile sea. I imagined the rest of my day, bluffing my way through each lecture. The next seven hours would be miserable.

The small, stuffy room was filled to capacity. Some kids were even sitting on the floor. This has to be a violation of some kind of code, I thought angrily. There's no way I can manage a class this size. I had stepped out from behind the desk, steeling my will to take on the challenge ahead, when the room fell suddenly and completely silent. What is going on? Through the open window I could hear the sound of the lawn mower grooming the football field and releasing that distinctive smell of summer, the scent of cut grass. A breeze began to blow through the room, providing welcome relief from the muggy morning heat. The tension of the moment hung in the air for what seemed like an hour. The mower, the green smell of fresh grass, and the gentle breezes held my senses hostage until I realized I was feeling the breezes somewhere I should not be feeling them—my upper thighs. The students' escalating snickers jerked me back into reality just as I looked down in horror to find I had forgotten more than my lesson plans that day. I had forgotten my pants!

And then I woke up.

It had all been a dream ... a particular kind of recurring nightmare I'd had for several weeks. These dreams all revolved around similar themes: being overwhelmed, being out of control, or missing an important deadline like college exams or, as I had just experienced, being unprepared for the first day of school. Why wouldn't they just go away?

I looked around the room to get my bearings. My husband was sleeping peacefully next to me, his chest rhythmically rising and falling with each breath. The moonlight peeking through the shades revealed I was safe—there were no students in the room waiting to mock me into oblivion for forgetting my pants. All was well. I sat up and looked at the clock near my bed and discovered it was 2:45 a.m. The sun was not up yet, thank goodness! I lay back down on my pillow, relieved I could indulge in almost four more hours of blissful sleep.

Unfortunately, sleep escaped my grasp that night—and it wasn't the first time. Until recently, I had always been the "sleepy one" in the family. By 9:00 p.m., I was usually the one stomping grumpily around the house, turning off the lights and the TV. I was the one gathering up the cell phones for the night and shooing everyone into their rooms so I could fall into bed. Now, all of a sudden, everyone was begging me to turn out the lights. I was unable to settle down in the evenings regardless of how tired I felt. I hid under the covers and played word games on my iPhone long after the lights went out. I woke suddenly for no apparent reason throughout the night. And, like this particular night, I wanted to go to back to sleep—I tried to—but the adrenaline rush that woke me up kept my mind and body in a state of high alert until the sun came up and the alarm went off.

As I lay there trying to fall back to sleep, I thought about this persistent and unwelcome disruption to my routine. I hadn't felt like myself in months. Why was I so out of whack? It was mid-November and the year was coming to a close, but in some ways I felt as if it had never really taken place. The months had flown by with one major transition after another. We had moved into a new house and immediately discovered a mold (and rodent!) infestation that took over a year to repair. My husband and I were both busier than we'd ever been, and we were finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with breakneck schedules and overlapping deadlines. All of these things—t he good and the bad—began to take on a life of their own. I constantly felt I was forgetting something important ... and usually I was. I just couldn't manage all the competing demands anymore. I felt like a hamster running on a wheel I couldn't keep pace with, and I didn't know how to jump off.

For the first time since planting our church, I felt like I wanted to quit. It's not that I didn't love our church ... I did. It's not that I wasn't grateful ... I was. But at that moment, my ministry commitments seemed like the only negotiable things left on the table. I already felt as if I was throwing cargo over the side of a rapidly sinking ship, and even the valuable boxes were fair game. I never thought I would feel that way. I never really understood it when other people felt that way, although I always tried to be encouraging and helpful. And yet, here I was, ready to throw in the towel on everything I had spent the last fifteen years of my life helping to build. I was ready to walk away and never look back.

It was such a lonely place to be, too. Nobody, not even my husband, knew how I was feeling. I believed that telling anyone I was ready to quit would seem selfish and weak. On top of the stress was the guilt of knowing that what people saw on the outside was not the person I was on the inside. I was living a double life, but I was tired of the charade. I didn't want to fake it anymore; I just wanted to let it go. The funny thing is, letting it all go was just exactly what I needed to do. In fact, it's just exactly what I ultimately did. Only, I didn't let go by walking away from it all. I let go by learning to lean into God's grace and finding His divine rhythm for my life. It just took me a few more weeks to get there.

The moment finally came in our first church service of the new year. My husband, Stovall, was teaching a message called "Project or Process?" As he spoke, I clearly heard God speak to me for the first time in months. Kerri, you are not a project; you are My child. Our relationship is not a project; it is a covenant. Your life with Me is a forever commitment. I'm fully committed to you for eternity. Will you commit fully to a lifetime with Me?

Imagine you are married to a pastor and serve on the executive team of a church of twelve thousand people, and the Lord asks you if you will commit to a lifetime of living for Him. Of course, I had already made that commitment a long time ago. I became a believer in Christ when I was eight years old, and although my walk with Him has not been perfect (whose is?), it has been consistent. No, salvation was not the issue behind the words the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart. Neither were they words of rebuke or a command to commit to greater devotional disciplines. Instead, the Spirit's words to me were simply an invitation—an invitation to view everything in my life, including my relationship with God, through the lens of a sustainable, lifelong rhythm.

It was an invitation Jesus first gave to weary souls over two millennia ago:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me —watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. (Matthew 11:28–30 MSG)

Tired. Worn out. Burned out on religion. All of those words applied to the state I was in. And you know what? Recover your life ... real rest ... unforced ... free and light living. These were the kinds of words that described exactly the state of being I wanted to live in but could never quite attain. I wanted a lifestyle of unbroken fellowship with Jesus. I wanted to learn to live in the rhythms of grace. And more than anything, I wanted Jesus to set the pace for my life.

Since that first Sunday of the new year when God reminded me that our relationship was a covenant and not a project, God has been teaching me more about what it means to walk in time with Him. As we travel together through the pages of this book, I'll share how I learned, and continue to learn, what it means to allow God to set the pace for my life. In the process, my prayer is that I can be a friend to you as you discover your own rhythms of grace.

Let the Music Move You

Rhythms of grace are God's divine tempo for your life. But before we talk more about what that means, we need to consider the nature of rhythm itself as well as our most basic response to it, which is movement. Sometimes while I'm grocery shopping, I suddenly realize I have been tapping my fingers on the cart in response to a song that's being played in the store. When I'm waiting in my car stopped at a traffic signal and someone pulls up next to me with their windows down and the bass booming through their speakers, I start to bob my head, to my kids' extreme embarrassment! I'm not trying to embarrass them, I just can't help it—I respond to music with movement.

I have a few playlists on my iPod that I listen to when I'm working out. There are different kinds of music for different kinds of movement. When I engage in the slow and sustained movements of stretching, I like to listen to the ethereal tunes of Enya or piano instrumentals. But when it comes to cardio workouts, Enya won't do. I need energy! I need motivation! I need speed! So I pump Lecrae into my headphones. Why? Because the rhythm makes me move. How I move—the speed, the motion, the duration —is a response to the beat I am listening to. The rhythm of the music sets my workout pace, but when it comes to the pace of my life, I have to ask, Who is setting the rhythm? The answer depends on who has access to my ears, my mind, and my heart in that moment.

What music is playing the loudest in your ears right now? How would you describe your "movements" in response to that music? The answers to these questions matter because they provide an essential clue about who—or what—i s setting the rhythm for your life. For example, are your movements through this season of life timid and hesitant? Perhaps the voice of insecurity has access to your ears. Are your movements disjointed and chaotic? Maybe guilt or fear is playing the theme song of your life. Or perhaps, like me, your movements have taken on a crazy momentum of their own. You're not sure who is setting the pace, but you know you're out of control.

Looking back, it's clear to me that I had been on the path toward burnout for a while. Over a period of two years, I had allowed myself to listen to some pretty destructive music. I was moving in response to rhythms set by ambition, fear, guilt, insecurity, and perfectionism (to name just a few).

People have different responses when it comes to dealing with the demands of life. Some people hop on the hamster wheel and keep going faster and faster, as if they can outrun the stress or even run away from it. Some people feel so helpless and out of control that they just stop moving altogether. Maybe you are the type of person who ignores problems in the hope that they will somehow magically go away. I understand each of those reactions—and I have experienced them plenty of times! Scripture exhorts us to "run with endurance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1 NASB). We can't do that standing still, nor can we do it if we are so drained and frazzled that we collapse before we even see the finish line.

Endurance running is all about running at the right pace, and to finish strong each runner needs to find her own tempo. Somewhere between the hamster wheel and the full stop there is a perfect pace, a rhythm that is a custom fit for your life and the leg of the race you are running right now. This perfect pace is God's tempo for your life, His perfect rhythm. His grace is what gives you the freedom and power to find that rhythm and walk in it. Finding that rhythm and keeping pace with it is the key to running the race of life and faith with endurance until you cross the finish line.

What Rhythms of Grace Are—And Are Not

So what does it mean to experience rhythms of grace, to find God's tempo for our lives? It means we create space in our days, weeks, and months for spiritual and emotional renewal. We allow our relationship with God to structure our lives and mark out their rhythm. One way to understand how such sacred rhythms work is to consider how holiday rhythms work.

Every culture in the world operates according to an annual rhythm set, in large part, by its seasons and holidays. In the United States, Labor Day, followed by Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day punctuate the first part of the school year with rhythm. In my family, during the school year we march to the beat of busy days for several weeks, but we always look forward to the next holiday—the promised fermata that provides a welcome pause in the tempo staccato of our daily schedules.

Many annual holidays around the world were originally set by the church calendar and, thus, were referred to as holy days. Over time, the two words got smashed together to give us the word holidays, but the modern term no longer carries the associations with sacred moments. Don't get me wrong. I love seeing my family, cooking huge meals, wrapping and giving gifts, decorating the house—even all the extra busyness these seasons bring. But as much as I love the fall and winter holidays, they do not mark out a sacred rhythm. If we desire a life that moves to the rhythms of grace, then sacred rhythms—rhythms set to God's tempo for us—must mark out the measure of our years and create space for our bodies, minds, and spirits to be refreshed and renewed. That's what rhythms of grace are—a spiritual structure for rest and restoration.

How, then, are we to establish sacred rhythms for our lives? And what should we do in those holy spaces in time? In the chapters that follow, we'll explore several aspects of the grace-paced life and consider some practical ways to use them. However, it's important first to acknowledge some potential misconceptions by saying what rhythms of grace are not.

Rhythms of grace are not primarily about:

• Time management. We will have to consider how we use our time, but that is not the focus. Instead, our focus is on how to see time for what it is—eternity in disguise. The pace of our lives is sacred. Our time on this earth is fleeting, yet our lives are eternal. What we do on the temporal side has an impact on the eternal side.

• Discipline. Discipline will be required, but it is not the goal.

• Habits. You will likely develop new habits, but they will serve as a framework for something deeper.

• Withdrawing from the world to engage in spiritual practices. You will engage in spiritual practices, to be sure, but they will set the tone of your everyday life instead of being something separate and compartmentalized.

• Saying no and setting boundaries. The discernment and strength you need in order to do these things will emerge from the rhythms of grace, but they are not the starting point.