Slowing down
I spent Saturday at the Colton Farmers and Crafters Market. Like I said on my very first post on this blog, it is one of those events that makes you love living in a small town. (For those of you who read that post, I now know where the outhouse went…)
The attendance has been poor, presumably because the weather has been lousy, but the market is still a lot of fun. I get to spend time with people there that I generally don’t spend time with otherwise.
The pace of life is a little nicer there for a couple of hours. We slow down a bit. We wander the booths looking at the stuff for sale, our kids run in the grass even my dog finally settled down and slept under the back bumper of the bus.
It may have been, for at least a little while, that the nagging voice in my head, the one that tells me all about the things I’m not getting done, was quiet. It was glorious.
It makes a person wish that life would slow down like that a little more often.
We have a tendency to get so busy that we don’t take time for the people around us. We see them. We may even talk to them. But we don’t take much time for them. We can be driven by the tyranny of the urgent and miss the things that are really important.
The problem in that is that God calls us to relationship – both with Him and with each other. It’s a huge part of what we’re called to do. The greatest commandment is to love God. The second is to love our neighbor. We aren’t going to love if we don’t take any time to even know each other. So for me the market has been a good exercise in slowing down. I can’t say I know everyone there well yet, but perhaps as the summer goes on I will slow down enough to do so.
I hope so.
(By the way, if you want more info on the market go to http://coltonfarmersmarket.org/ )
