A Note from Me
I’ve heard a saying attributed to the saints: If you’re not growing, you’re moving backward.
That rings true to my experience. Progress in Christlikeness is not automatic. Time alone does not transform us. We can spend years hoping to become more gentle, more patient, more loving, without ever becoming more intentional about how we live. Apprenticeship to Jesus requires a peculiar combination of diligence and vigilance.
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there’s a word for this: nepsis—sober-minded alertness. It means refusing to sleepwalk through the present: remaining attentive to God, to ourselves, and to what stands in the way of God’s kind of love growing within us.
Of course, vigilance can become excessive. We can become so preoccupied with whether we are making progress that we measure every moment for evidence of growth. But growth isn’t linear. And some seasons of regression expose precisely what still needs to be healed.
So much of the transformational journey is learning to hold truths like these in balance. The answer is rarely to reject one truth in favor of its opposite, but to learn to live faithfully in the tension between them.
A Voice from the Christian Tradition
From his Birmingham jail cell in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
“It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
—I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
A Question to Carry
What would it look like to stay awake to the flow of time this week?
Thanks for reading,
—Jon
