Does it seem to you that God’s pace for your life has slowed down to a crawl? The important thing is to walk with him, whether that pace seems slow or suddenly speeds up, as it often does. In Galatians 5:25, the Apostle Paul had the best advice of all: “Keep in step with the Spirit.” 

Methuselah, a California Bristlecone Pine tree, is coming up on its estimated 4,789th birthday. Squat, twisted, weathered, and storm-battered, it stretches its jagged fingers toward the blue skies over the White Mountains in eastern California. It is alive and growing, although very, very s-l-o-w-l-y. It was already ancient when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and it may very well last until he returns. 

Looking at a picture of this amazing tree made me think of a passage I once read in a book by Frederick Faber, an English hymn writer and theologian who lived a couple of centuries ago. “In spiritual life,” wrote Faber, “[God] vouchsafes to try our patience first of all by his slowness…He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and he has been from eternity. Thus grace for the most part acts slowly…He works by little and by little, and sweetly and strongly he compasses his ends, but with a slowness which tries our faith, because it is so great a mystery…We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and he will come.”  

Yes, from our perspective God’s grace sometimes moves slowly. Paul remained in a Caesarean jail for two long years before he finally arrived in Rome. God’s people waited in Egypt four hundred years before they were ready for the next challenge. The Israelites sometimes camped in one spot in the wilderness for a year at a time, waiting for the cloud of God’s presence to signal a resumption of their march to the Promised Land. 

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