00:00 The Pace of Peace
05:20 Taking Inventory of Your Life
15:49 Less Striving, More Gratitude
21:17 The Problem with Distraction
25:27 Simple Practices for Being Present
30:31 Technology and the Attention Economy
33:59 Becoming a Person of Love

Links:

• The Pace of Peace by Jay Kim

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker: 00:05
What is the cost of a life that never slows down? It’s a question I really have found myself needing to ask lately. Maybe you’re like me. If you’re new here, I’m Amy Julia Becker, and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. Jay Kim, author of The Pace of Peace, joins me today to explore how smartphones, endless striving, and the pressure to stay busy pull us away from the present moment and the people we love. Jay is the lead pastor at Westgate. It’s a multi-congregational church in Silicon Valley. He’s the host of IVP’s Digital Examine podcast and the author of several books, and he also serves on the board of Practicing the Way. All of these years of experience have led him to become someone who can offer us practical ways to reclaim our attention, cultivate gratitude, and find a deeper, more relational kind of peace. I’m really grateful for his words, both on this podcast and in his book.

Jay Kim: 01:18
Oh, it’s so good to be with you, Amy Julia. Thank you so much for having me.

Amy Julia Becker: 01:23
Well, I was really drawn to the title of your latest book. It’s called The Pace of Peace. And so I wanted to start there. What do you, when you hear the words pace of peace, what do you think that means and why write a book about it?

Jay Kim: 01:37
Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. Um well, the two key words, pace and peace, uh, you know, are are the sort of anchors. Uh all of us live at a particular pace, you know, to be human is to be alive and to be active in some form or fashion. And we don’t control time. Um, so we are all moving to a particular rhythm. Uh, but, you know, there’s 24 hours in a day, but the way we fill that day is uh in large part up to us. I know it feels quite a bit in the modern world like we lack control and life is just sort of happening to us. But um, the reality is, the sort of hopeful truth is that uh we have much more agency over the pace of our lives than we might think. And then, you know, I think most of us, um, like religious or not, spiritual or not, like just most people living in the helter skelter of life in the modern West, I think most of us would say, gosh, I could use not just a bit more peace, but probably a lot more peace.

Amy Julia Becker: 02:49
Yeah.

Jay Kim: 02:49
Um, but it’s probably also important to distinguish, you know, when I talk about peace, I think most of us probably think of like peace and quiet, you know, we think of tranquility, we think of our favorite mug filled with our favorite coffee or tea, you know, sitting by a lake or something, uh, a way, a respite from the chaos and the noise. And that’s beautiful, and that is a form of peace. But um, I I’m thinking about peace in a much more expansive, holistic way. Um, you know, in Jewish tradition, uh, in Hebrew, the word for peace is shalom, which actually is not about tranquility. Um, it’s not even really primarily about sort of external environments or circumstances, it’s about uh relational wholeness and um connection, deep union. And so the pace of peace for me is the pace of deep, meaningful relationship and connection, you know, to God and and to others. And uh it’s something that’s just uh I’ve been desperate for in recent years, and so that’s where the book came from.

Amy Julia Becker: 03:59
Yeah. Well, so just kind of building on that, there’s a um place where you write a deep life, which I think is a more peaceful life, perhaps, is incongruent with a fast life. And I’m guessing that a lot of readers or listeners, excuse me, will respond as the way I did as a reader, which was like, okay, I resonate with that. Like my life is moving really, really fast. It usually isn’t peaceful. Um, and so that’s a little bit of a gut check, but I also feel somewhat helpless in the face of it. And you just mentioned like we have more agency with than we think we do, and yet we don’t feel like we have that agency. And so I’m wondering like, how do we do it? Like, how do we move at the pace of peace? How do we get some of that like busyness out of just our um really everyday lives that feel impossibly full?

Jay Kim: 04:49
I I mean, I wish there was like a very easy, simple three-step plan, you know, I could give you. I wish life was like a chair you buy at IKEA and you just kind of pull out the instructions and go, although there’s deep frustration with bad experience as well, I’m sure, for people. Um there is no silver bullet, uh, but there is a path. And I would say the the first step is to take serious, thoughtful, for followers of Jesus, I would say prayerful inventory of your life. Um that that is not uh an end-all be-all, but I do think for most of us, not all of us, but for most of us, it is a first step in the right direction. I just, I think most in my own life and most of the people that I know, um, particularly here in Silicon Valley where I live, which is one of the most sort of aggressively uh upward mobile, up into the right, you know, um chasing excess sort of cultures in the world, really. We just we are so uh we’re so incessantly committed to progress that we fail to stop and reflect and take inventory of our lives. So if possible in a person’s life, I always uh invite folks to build into the rhythm of their life, maybe on a weekly basis, um, a pause. And it can be a brief pause. It could be, you know, 10 minutes of every week at a set time, um, again, for followers of Jesus, prayerfully reflecting on your calendar, on your schedule, on your list of priorities, on uh the cumbersome task list that always grows larger, never get never gets smaller. And ask the question, you know, how much of this really looks like the shape of a meaningful life? How much of the stuff that in my body I feel like it’s so important? How much of it is like really important? You know, if if I if I do this particular thing really well, if I just crush it with these several tasks on my task list, will it actually matter? You know, in the big scheme of things. And again, not for everybody, but for most people, I have discovered when we take thoughtful inventory of our lives, almost always there are a few and usually several and sometimes many things that we have given so much of our energy and attention to that we we quickly realize I don’t think that thing uh deserves as much of my energy or my or my attention as I’ve been giving it. And that is then how we carve out the space necessary to live at the pace of meaningful, deep, abiding relationships. And um that’s how we slow down our life. Because again, as you said, I believe, you know, a deep life is incongruent with a fast life. You cannot live deeply while living quickly and on the go all the time. Uh so that’s what I would say, you know, begin with thoughtful, prayerful uh inventory of your life.

Amy Julia Becker: 08:33
So can you give us an example of like what what you just described looks like in your life or what it has looked like? I’m kind of thinking that maybe you’re at a place of like, now this is a regular practice, but it wasn’t always that way. And I’d kind of like to hear about both of those. Like, what happened when you first started thinking this way? Was it like, oh, shoot, I have to like, you know, call and cancel all these different appointments? Or, you know, and what does it look like now? Is it like, oh yes, every morning I take my calendar and I pray about it and I then make adjustments? You know, so both the like, where did this get start and what happened then? And also like, what does it look like now?

Jay Kim: 09:11
It’s a wonderful question. Cause I think at the end of the day, it has to get practical and pragmatic. You know, these are lovely things to talk about, but if it doesn’t actually uh meet us in the sort of trenches of our lives, then they’re just wonderful ideas that live in our heads but make no sort of real change in our actual lived lives. So um a few a few things come to mind. They’re all connected. Uh I think that one, there are sometimes just divine disruptions in our lives that almost not in an abusive way, but in a gentle, loving way, um force us into reflection. So uh in the Pace of Peace, my book, I I actually end the book with the story of a panic attack I had a number of years ago. And I wasn’t expecting it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, you know, today would be a nice day for a panic attack. Nobody wants that. Um, but it was an intensely busy season of my life. I had not taken into account um just how tense my body was all the time in that season. And long story short, um I tell the story in the book, but basically I drop I have two young children and I do drop off in the mornings. And uh I had dropped them off at school, and um, it was a Friday, which for me is a day off. Fridays and Saturdays are actually my days off. And uh typically Fridays I don’t work, but um I was in such an intensely busy season. I had a plan to work like a full day that day. And uh so I drop my kids off and I’m actually driving to the office to get going, and my body’s already sort of tense and anxious because of so much that I’ve got to get done before the end of the day. And all of a sudden, I just feel this intense weight on my chest. I can’t breathe. Eventually, I need to pull over into the parking lot of this little strip mall, and I have this very intense, the most intense panic attack I’ve ever had in my life. And um, I just sensed um God’s spirit saying one word to me, and the word was stop. And I remember having this prayerful dialogue with the Lord, like stop what? What exactly? I have 14 things I need to get done today. Which of those 14 should I stop? And I just continuously heard, no, no, no, no, you don’t understand. Just stop, period. Full stop, just stop. And so I did. I didn’t get done anything I was supposed to get done that day, and um, it was such a beautiful lesson because the world continued to spin and things did not end in disaster, and uh everything sort of worked out just fine. Yeah, and and I’m alive, and I uh dropped my kids off again at school today, and I’m so glad I was able to. I’m so glad that everything didn’t come to an end that day. And um, so I think there are moments where we are gently, lovingly ushered into these sort of divine disruptions that that force us to take deep reflection. And then more sort of proactively, I would say there are two rhythms I would recommend. One, if possible, uh, this is something that my wife and I practice. Um, once a week, I would recommend just putting into your calendar, you know, if you can, 30 minutes, if you’re able, maybe an hour. If you’re able, maybe an entire sort of half day. I know that’s a stretch for most of us, but at minimum, you know, 30 minutes where you can sit. If you’re married, you can sit with your partner, or if um maybe you’ve got roommates, or you know, you live in some sort of communal living experience, maybe with the the people that you share space with, or just as an individual, um, and find a place that slows your body down and um take a look at your calendar and the list of tasks that are before you and ask the question: are there things I can eliminate? Um, is there one thing I can delete from my calendar or from my task list? And it’s gonna feel small at first, but um, just the practice of uh carving out margin in your life, I think, will begin to feel over time like liberation from the tyranny of the urgent. And then on an annual basis, this is again something that my wife and I practice. I could pop up my calendar, my shared calendar with my wife on my phone with you right now and show you there are stretches in our annual schedule. So um there are long stretches in not long, but uh a couple of weeks uh in December where on our calendar it says um limit commitments. And there’s another stretch like that in the spring. Uh, and then we have a stretch in the summer that is sort of a family break for us. It works well because my my wife is a high school teacher, so she gets summers off, my kids have summers off, obviously, and then I um lock in my vacations right in that window as well. So we have these annual rhythms that are two to three week stretches where it’s in our calendar, we’re limiting commitments. It empowers me with um the gift of saying no. You know, there is so much uh demand on all of us. And um, you have to work preemptively to be able to say, oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t commit to that because my family or I as an individual have these little stretches of my year where I don’t take on any commitments. Um, so I can recalibrate and reset uh so that I can give my whole self back to the world as a gift.

Amy Julia Becker: 15:11
I love that. That’s really helpful. Um, I haven’t ever thought about doing those, like yeah, proactively thinking about the rhythms of the school year. We’re still in a school year cycle as well, um, that do get particularly intense. And I also find that just um I need to be a couple weeks out, even to say I’m going to have a day or half a day where there are no meetings. Because that’s only going to happen if I block out again, whether it’s the entire day or the three or four hours, a couple weeks in advance because of how many things are popping up all over the time or all of the time. Uh, this is somewhat related, I think, because you write, what we need isn’t more at all. What we need is less. And not primarily for the sake of self-optimization or even self-fulfillment. We need less in order to live more fully. Uh, so I wanted to talk about what it is that we need less of. I mean, we’ve been talking about needing less kind of to-dos on our to-do list and less commitments in our calendars. Are you also talking, are you talking about other things? Are you just talking about time or are you also talking about like stuff? Um, so I’m curious what it looks like to have less.

Jay Kim: 16:25
I mean, I do think that there is in, you know, taken responsibly, there is a gift in the sort of minimalism movement, although that can get hijacked and become sort of an idol in our lives that actually causes way more striving. So my short answer would be, yeah, I do think some of it has to do with stuff for sure. But more than that, if I had to identify, you know, in a single word, what do we need less of? Um, and this is actually a chapter in the book. I would say we need, at least again, in the modern West, I sense that what we what we really need to decrease in our lives is is striving. Uh, we need less striving. You know, there’s that famous sort of antidote about um uh John D. Rockefeller. There, there was a, I think it was a journalist who asked him, you know, hey, Rockefeller, how much is enough? And his response was, just a little bit more. And that is the ethos of our day. You know, I think most of us, when we’re really honest with ourselves, we would say, Oh gosh, I have bought that lie, hook, line, and sinker. You know, how much is enough? Well, just a little bit more.

Amy Julia Becker: 17:43
Yeah.

Jay Kim: 17:44
And that is, you know, what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, you know, hedonic meaning hedonism or the pursuit of pleasure. And um, they called it a treadmill because the reality is you are constantly chasing, but you’ll never arrive. And that is what striving is. We just we striving is the cultural air we breathe in some ways. And so um I think that’s what I’m talking about primarily. We need less striving. And I think the path, you know, you can’t it it rarely works in any component of our lives. It rarely works to say, okay, I’m just gonna do less of that. What you really need um as a human being is something else to attach to. And I would suggest that um the way we fight for less striving is to seek more gratitude in our lives, to begin to see all of life, even the ordinary and the mundane, and in fact, even the painful and the difficult, to see it all as a gift and to become the sorts of people who are able to receive life as a gift rather than seeing life as a sort of tug-a-war where we’re constantly sort of trying to achieve and accumulate more and more. Um, biblically speaking, you know, when you think about um the story of the Bible, it’s interesting in Genesis chapters one and two, which are the opening chapters of the Bible, they essentially tell us the story of a good God making a good world. It’s interesting that um in the story, God creates the world in six days. And on the sixth day, the culmination of his creation are human beings. And after he makes human beings, he he does, he eventually tells them to go and steward creation, you know, to work and to bring the good potential of the world to bear. But what’s interesting is right after he makes humans, before he sends them off to work, the first gift he gives them is the seventh day. And the Bible calls it um a day of rest or the Sabbath day. And there’s a lot to say about that. But essentially what that means is human beings are made to work from rest, not to work for rest. But in our culture today, we have reversed that sort of original design of human experience. We now basically are working for the weekend. You know what I mean? Like that is the adage. We are like striving away so that we can get to Friday night where we can finally enjoy, you know, the the um the fruit of our toil and our labor. And that’s actually not it. You know, we are actually made to begin with rest, to begin from a place of of margin and not strive to succeed, but with gratitude for the gift of rest to work to bring the good the potential of the good world to bear.

Amy Julia Becker: 21:02
It does sound really beautiful. Um, and I want I want to be that person. I’m thinking about so we’ve talked about speed or like busyness moving at a fast pace, and we’ve talked about striving. And those are related, but they’re not the same thing. But then there’s this third kind of piece of our frantic pace that I want to bring in, which is distraction. Um, and again, just to quote you back to you, you wrote, we could say that distraction is the embodied expression of absence. I found that really powerful, especially in a book that’s really about the um what is needed to live in peace is actually of relationships, right? So if we’re embodying an expression of absence, um, then that’s a problem. But so what do you mean by that? Like can you explain like why distraction is the embodied expression of absence and how that kind of plays itself out?

Jay Kim: 21:52
I mean, I think when I think about my own experience of distraction and you know, in large part this this book was born of my own. Um proclivity to live a scattered life, my tendency to be pulled in a multitude of directions. And, you know, a number of years ago, sort of leading up to and in the aftermath of that panic attack that I talked about earlier, just realizing that one of the reasons I felt so intensely broken in that season was because I was, meaning my life had was just a series of scattered thoughts and emotions and ambitions and intentions. I realized that I had very quickly lost the ability to be totally present in the moment that is. And uh there’s this philosopher, Dallas Willard, he said a number of years ago beautifully that God can only meet us right now. That God can re can redeem our past, he can shape our future, but in terms of union with the divine, that only happens right now because as finite embodied human beings, we can only live in the present. My mind often wanders to the past, and it is inundated with regret and guilt and shame and what ifs and you know, whatever. My mind can often wander to the future. If I do this, then maybe this will happen. It’s sort of a futile pursuit of control, you know. Um, but ultimately God only meets me in the here and now because ultimately, as a finite human being living within three-dimensional time and space, the only place I occupy is the present. And distraction is a way of leaving the present and going from being an integrated, embodied, present human being and allowing ourselves to become scattered in a number of directions that isn’t right here. So I think most people will be able to relate to this, particularly in the digital age, when we just have these little black boxes, you know, in our back pockets that are essentially distraction machines. They’re intended to grab our attention and to take us to places that are not right here. Um we culture is designed to distract us. It is designed to take us to places that are not present in the here and now. And so um I think it matters so much, and uniquely so in our day and age, that we exercise the muscle of attention to live in deep awareness of the present moment and again to receive it as a gift. Um, and that is, in my estimation, and in my experience, that is the one and only way to begin living a truly holistic, grounded, settled, embodied, integrated life.

Amy Julia Becker: 25:24
So speaking of practicing living in the presence, I mean the present, what um what does that look like? Just again, what are some for listeners who are like, yeah, that sounds great. And I don’t know how to do that because I’m exactly what you just described. I’m someone who’s distracted by my phone, who’s living in the past and the future, and who’s just like moving too quickly all the time.

Jay Kim: 25:46
Yeah, very specific practices have become really help helpful for me. So prayer is a significant part of my life. And what I do not mean by that is that I’m like a monk living in a monastery or a monastic, you know, living in the desert with a small community of people who just sit and meditate all day. I live in the Silicon Valley, I have a full-time job. Um, my wife is a has a full-time job. We’re dual income, or we have an 11-year-old and an eight-year-old, and there’s basketball practice and baseball practice and dance and school and homework and church and friends and dinners and play dates and meals and family and holidays. And so I, you know, I can relate to the sense of like, I want that, but how is that even possible? So when I talk about prayer, I don’t mean every day I sit for an hour and just meditate. I wish I could, although in some ways that sounds quite boring. Um I mean prayer as an accessible, integrated part of the rhythms of my daily routines. So um it’s this is, you know, this is more descriptive than prescriptive. I think people have to find and discover what works well for them. But I’m sort of a routine guy. I sort of live by my schedule. And so I wake up at a particular time every day. Um, I try to get a little bit of exercise, which I think is um so critically important to at least move your body as an as a part of your sort of morning routine. Um, but yeah, I will make my coffee in the morning and I will pray the Lord’s Prayer and I pray it slowly and I pray it specifically, just line by line, over my own life, my family, the church that I belong to and serve. I’ll slowly pray the Lord’s prayer. And then throughout the day, I practice what are called breath prayers. And breath prayers, for those who are unfamiliar, they are literally what they sound like. It is a quick prayer you say as a breath. So you inhale a particular thought and you exhale a particular thought as a prayer. So one breath prayer that I’ve been practicing regularly, I’ve already prayed it today, is um throughout the day, multiple times throughout the day, I will pause and it literally takes me the length of a breath, a slow breath. I will inhale, God, you control outcomes, and I will exhale, just help me to be faithful. You control outcomes, help me to be faithful. Um, so I practice breath prayers, and then at the end of every day, um, as a family, we light a candle. Before our kids go to bed, we light a candle and we pray uh this ancient um prayer called the examine, which is actually sort of the framing of the book, The Pace of Peace. It’s five movements where you invite God to help you be aware of his loving presence. You express gratitude for something from the day, you reflect on a painful moment from the day, you confess where you got it wrong during the day, and then you think about one thing happening tomorrow where you could use God’s help and you ask him to help you. So um my my kids pray it every night as well, and it just takes a few moments. But those are some prayer rhythms that uh have been really helpful for me.

Amy Julia Becker: 29:19
I love that because of um there’s so many different aspects to what you just said, right? There’s um the practicality of this just being paired with your ordinary life and the life that many of us can uh relate to. There’s the honestly, like this is not, as you said, uh taking an hour of concentrated time all at once. Um, and I love that communal, like this is something that can happen with our kids. And so um there’s both uh a rhythm to that and accountability to it. Um I’m sure there’s so much that’s just fun to hear from them, but you’re also modeling something for them and for yourself as far as what it means to be honest. I just that’s really beautiful and I love um, I love that structure. And it makes me wonder because on the one hand, you’re kind of bringing this into a very modern moment, right? Even just um the word outcomes from your breath prayer, right, is not something you’re gonna like find in the Bible. Um, it’s something that is just relevant to your life. And yet there’s also this kind of ancient set of practices, whether that’s the Lord’s prayer from 2,000 years ago or the prayer of examine, which is certainly many hundreds of years old. And so what I’m thinking about is like we are in this particular moment where we’ve got smartphones and we’ve got cars that make us move faster in airplanes and, you know, all sorts of things that just make everything faster. And we’re also like the same old humans we’ve always been who get distracted and move too fast and forget about relationships as the core of what we’re who we are. And so I’m just thinking about like, in what ways is this something that humans have always needed to learn and needed to teach one another? And what’s kind of new about our moment that maybe makes it um particularly challenging?

Jay Kim: 31:04
Yeah, it’s a really astute point you’re making. You know, distraction is not a modern problem. So if you read like the ancients, if you read the monastics, you know, third and fourth century desert fathers and mothers, um, or uh various uh monks living in monasteries across the ages, what you discover is that distraction has always been a problem, uh, long before the internet and the smartphone. But to the second part of your question, um, we do live in a uniquely distracted age because never before in human history have people had such immediate access to such uh a breadth of information, entertainment. Um again, as I said earlier, you know, these little black boxes in our back pockets called smartphones, they are distraction devices, they are distraction machines, intentionally so. That’s not an accident, you know. Um Tristan Harris, the design ethicist, he says we live in an attention economy. And what he means by that is that these mega corporations that are creating um the hardware and the software that are ubiquitous in our lives, the apps on your phone, everything running on your laptop or your tablet the moment you open it, the moment you turn on your television, the moment you open Netflix, and you have this endless queue of things that you could possibly watch. You know, we live in an age where there is dollar signs attached to our attention. And there are very powerful corporations who office within a few miles of where I’m sitting right now in Silicon Valley, who are making millions, billions, and trillions of dollars because we are perpetually distracted and because our attention is scattered. And so that is unique to this moment. Never before in history has distraction sort of been ubiquitous, or the potential possibility for distraction been so ubiquitous and accessible everywhere and all and at all times. So, really um uh technology in large part is uh exposing something that is already sort of inherently a human tendency, uh, which is the tendency to be distracted. And um, the only way we are going to resist is through intentionality and recapturing and stewarding well the gift that is human attention.

Amy Julia Becker: 33:57
I’m wondering about the role of like relationships. You’ve talked a little bit about like kind of bringing this into your family. And yet you’ve also mentioned, like we’ve talked, I guess, a lot about these kind of both personal assessments and personal practices that I think are all important and they make sense to me that they would be kind of helping me cultivate a different way of being in this world. And yet, if the purpose of that is to be relationally connected, both to God, but also to one another, um I’d love to just bring the relationships into this conversation in the sense that what are what is the goal of this, right? Is it to just be like kind of in a state of zen contemplative bliss all the time? I know it’s more than that, but like what what is the relational part of what we’re kind of made for, going for, looking for, um, able to receive or give. Yeah. Can you just speak about relationships a little bit?

Jay Kim: 34:55
Yeah, my belief is that the telos of the human life um or the end goal, the ultimate end of human experience is to be formed into a person of love. Um, I believe that as a Christian in large part because uh the the Bible tells us that God is love. And that makes all the sense in the world because God is a trinity, God is a relationship. He has always been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, living in perfect, harmonious, loving relationships, loving relationship since before the human story began.

Amy Julia Becker: 35:39
Yeah.

Jay Kim: 35:40
And and then the Bible tells us that humans are made in God’s image. And, you know, most listeners will know this. Like, that doesn’t mean God looks like a middle-aged Asian American man, you know? Um it means that there is something of the human spirit that reflects the divine. And what we know about the divine is that, again, he is love, and that God has always existed as a loving relationship. And that’s why I say the ultimate end of human experience is to be formed into a person of love. That is what we’re made for. And, you know, I I think for me, ultimately, um that’s that’s what it comes down to is uh is there anything that keeps me from becoming the person of love that I sense God has called me to become, that is the ultimate end, the ultimate telos of human experience. And that’s the stuff that going back earlier in our conversation, that’s the stuff that I need to stop, reflect, and seriously consider sort of deleting or eliminating from life, because it is the stuff that keeps me from relationship. Um to become a person of love is to become the sort of person who can bind oneself to another. There was um St. Thomas Aquinas, he once defined love as um uh love is to will the good of the other, even at great cost to oneself. And so love is by its very nature relational. I know there’s a lot of talk these days uh, you know, um, about self-love, and I think that is really important. I don’t think we can become people of love until we are at able to adequately and deeply receive love. And that includes the ability to love ourselves. But self-love is incomplete because love by its nature is relational, and there is a relationship you have with yourself, but undeniably, to be human is to live in um and surrounded by others, by God, by people, by creation itself. And so uh it is relational. Love is also relational in a sort of outward-facing way. And so to become a person of love is to be able to adequately receive the love of God and the love of others, and then to return that love back to God and to others. So when you read the Bible, there are all of these stories of people um going to places that feel peaceful. So a story that comes to mind would be there’s this prophet named Elijah, and he goes to a mountain and he’s in a really bad spot and he seeks God’s presence. And the story tells us that he experiences like a firestorm and a windstorm and an earthquake. And it says God was not in all of these massive things. And then God speaks to Elijah in a gentle whisper, with this peaceful, gentle, warm voice. And so God, then Elijah experiences union with God. But what’s so interesting is at the end of that story, God then tells Elijah, now, Elijah, go back, go back to the people. When you look at the life of Jesus, he’s surrounded by the crowds, and yet on a very regular basis, it tells us that Jesus wanders off. He wanders away from the crowds, away from his friends, and he goes to these hillsides and he spends time with God in the quiet. But then at the end of it, every single time, he goes back to the people. And so that is the rhythm. That is the rhythm, I would say, of peace. Again, peace is about relational connection, loving connection. And so, yes, we need to carve out margin in our lives. Less is more, less striving, receiving life as a gift with deep gratitude, but receiving that all of that so that we might go back into loving relationships with others, so that our lives might be given in love as a gift, um, in the midst of all of the relationships that are within the proximity of our lives.

Amy Julia Becker: 40:16
I think that’s probably a good place to end this conversation and really beautiful. It certainly makes me um your book, as well as this conversation, do some of that work of examine, right? Of examining um my commitments and my schedule, um, but also just my desires, like that that sense of less striving. Like, what are what are you striving for? Um, and what would it mean to be you probably wouldn’t be striving, but to be um orienting myself towards love and relationship, um, and letting some other uh practices and um purposes, I guess, like fall into place and result as a result. So um thank you so much just for all this wisdom and uh the very um pragmatic, you know, here’s how I might live that out uh that you’ve offered both here and again in your book. I really appreciate it.

Jay Kim: 41:11
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it was a joy.

Amy Julia Becker: 41:17
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. If this conversation resonates with you, I would love to have you join me by subscribing to my Reimagining the Good Life newsletter on Substack. That newsletter extends this work. We every week challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. You’ll find the link to subscribe in the show notes. And of course, if you’re enjoying the show, follow, rate, review, share, send us a text to tell us what you’re thinking. You’ll find a link to do that at the end of the show notes as well. And as always, thank you to Jake Hanson for editing this episode and to Amber Beery, my director of content, for producing the show, and thank you for being here. Let’s all keep reimagining the good life together.