If you’ve spent any time around here at all, you know that I often struggle with rushing and being busy and a generally too-full calendar. I’m really grateful for Jay Kim’s words, both on my podcast and in his latest book, The Pace of Peace.
1. A Deep Life Requires a Slower Pace
Peace is more than quiet or the absence of chaos. It is about connection and meaningful relationships with God and others. We may have more agency over the pace of our lives than we realize.
2. Make Room for What Matters Most
Taking inventory of our lives means looking honestly at our calendars, commitments, and priorities and asking what is truly important. Small, regular practices of reflection—and the willingness to eliminate even one thing—can create space for deeper relationships.
3. Choose Gratitude Over Striving
Our culture tells us we need a little bit more, whether that means more achievement, productivity, or possessions. But rather than constantly striving for what comes next, we can learn to receive our lives, including the ordinary and difficult parts, as gifts. We are meant to work from a place of rest, not work in order to earn rest.
4. Recover the Practice of Being Present
Distraction pulls us away from the people and places right in front of us, scattering our attention between regrets about the past and anxieties about the future. Through simple practices like breath prayers and shared family rhythms, we can learn to attend to God and to the present moment.
5. Peace Makes Us More Available for Love
The goal isn’t to create lives of perfect tranquility or to turn inward toward personal fulfillment. It is to become people who can receive love from God and others and offer that love in return. We step away to find connection with God so that we can return to our relationships with greater presence and give ourselves as a gift to others.
“A deep life is incongruent with a fast life. You cannot live deeply while living quickly and on the go all the time.”
“The ultimate end of human experience is to be formed into a person of love.”
“We live in an age where there are dollar signs attached to our attention. Corporations are making trillions of dollars because we are perpetually distracted… The only way we are going to resist is through intentionality and recapturing and stewarding well the gift that is human attention.”
“St. Thomas Aquinas once defined love as… love is to will the good of the other, even at great cost to oneself.”
“Peace is about relational connection, loving connection… We carve out the space necessary to live at the pace of meaningful, deep, abiding relationships.”
Go here for more: Are You Too Busy to Become a Person of Love? • Jay Kim • S11 E3
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Amy Julia Becker desires to challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and help us envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. Amy Julia invites people to reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of several books, including To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Take the Next Step and Reimagining the Good Life. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She is a member of the Disability Ministry Network and the Alliance for Disability Justice and Ethics in Reproductive Genetics. She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.
