Blog by Alan Fadling

When was the last time you felt truly unhurried? Not just caught up with your schedule but truly unhurried in your soul? I talk with pastors and leaders every week who feel stretched thin, who are running hard and wondering why their spiritual life feels flat.

Somewhere in the Christian classics there is a quieter wisdom, a way of living that moves at the pace of grace.

Today I want to continue where I left off two weeks ago with a couple of insights from nineteenth-century pastor Frederick Faber, whose words feel like they were written for our age of pressure and hurry. If your heart is tired or thirsty, this may be the invitation you’ve been needing.

The True Measure of Our Work

Read what Faber has to say about the heart behind our work: 

“The only important thing in good works is the amount of love we put into them. The soul of an action is its motive. … The power of an action is in its intention. An intention is pure in proportion as it is loving.”*

Sentences like these stop me every time. We’re surrounded by so many metrics by which we measure the goodness of what we do—attendance, popularity, visibility, efficiency. These metrics have their place, but they can quickly fade. They don’t tend to endure.

Love endures.

What matters most is not the size of our work but the love with which we offer it. In God’s economy, a quiet act of love done in secret carries immense weight—far more than a dazzling achievement offered for reasons other than love. And it lasts far longer!

Perhaps the pastoral question here isn’t “How much am I doing?” but “How much love is in what I’m doing?”

Maybe the call isn’t to increase the quantity of our service but the depth of our intention. To let our work, however small and hidden or large and visible, be rooted in love. Because love is the only measure that lasts.

The Dust That Hurry Raises

Finally, Faber offers one more picture of Christian leaders, perhaps the most vivid of all:

“They are so pressed by all they have taken upon themselves that they get into a hurry, and so raise a dust as they go; and this dust hinders them from seeing God.”†

I can feel that image in my body. I know what it’s like to take on more than grace has given—even good things, holy things. When the pressure builds, I slip into hurry. It doesn’t take much. Hurry kicks up dust.

We don’t usually think of hurry as something that blinds us, but that’s exactly what Faber names. Hurry raises a cloud that obscures our vision. Sometimes the activity I intend as service to God becomes the very thing that hides God from me.

Too much of even a good thing can become a veil that obscures God’s face.

And so the invitation I’ve extended time and time again comes back around: Slow down. Seek to do what you do with more love rather than more complexity or drivenness. Trust that clarity comes not from pressured activity but from unhurried presence.

Maybe the truest thing we can offer those we lead is not our fast pace but our unhurried presence. Not our dust but a clear sight of God.

All of these invitations—doing fewer things, savoring grace, working in love to settle the dust of our own hurry—are not ideas to master but ways of opening ourselves to God again. Maybe even now you notice a place where grace is nudging you to slow down, to breathe, to receive. Let’s take a moment to bring that place before God as we pray.

A Prayer for the Journey

Lord of rest and clarity,

forgive the dust I raise when I hurry.

Settle my soul like still water.

Clear my eyes to see you again.

Teach me the grace of doing less,

the courage of moving slowly,

the joy of walking in step with you.

Amen.

For Reflection: 

• What part of this reflection—about love, hurry, or clarity—felt closest to your current experience?
• What might this reveal about the way you are approaching your work or responsibilities right now?
• Where might you be invited to slow down and bring more love into something you are already doing?

 *Frederick Faber, Spiritual Conferences (The Peter Reilly Co., 1957), p. 198.

†Faber, Spiritual Conferences, p. 212.