The following quote later in the post is a direct copy from the Saturday inward/outward post.
I thought of it as I am here on "renewal leave" thinking at least, about slowing down.
I also thought of it last night. We had started late in the day , 2:15 PM, for the bush wlak to Keira Mt. The trail was rocky, wet, slippery, often dark because of the dense tree cover, steep, not always easy to find. I kept tellign Nick and Sara to step carefully and deliberatley ..go slow! The views were all that we had imagined and more. It was 5 pm when we made the summt. But the return trip would have caught us at dusk or even in the dark on the trail so I opted for a return hike by follwing the road back into town. It would be much much longer and we did not know how it would return us to the city but a marked road is better than an unknown trail for times like this. We walked in the "winter" dark , able to see the stars and still not sure of how to pick out the southern cross! This time I was telling the kids to step up the pace because the road was narrow with no shoulders and I had no idea of how long this walk would take. We could see the city lights spreading out far below us. I only knew the road was winding down , and we were dropping altitude. It eventualy took us back to a road that even had street lights and we found that we were on Mt Keira road. I found some one to tell us where we were and that in another 2o minutes we would come to Crown Street. Crown Street I knew, would take us to the mall near our apt! Still another twenty minutes on Crown street put us home, but as soon as we knew we were on a route that would get us to the destination, our comfort returned, spirits relaxed, to "a beautiful night for a walk." It does help to know that you are traveling a path that will not lead you wrong. It's just a matter of walking out the distance. Then slow down, and enjoy the journey. As I said, to Nick and Sara, we probably would be out for a walk anyway, what else was there to do!


..now the quote from BBT:
By Barbara Brown Taylor

For years I had kept hoping that intimacy with God would blossom as soon as I got everything done, got everyone settled, got my environment just right and my calendar cleared. I counted on it to come as a reward for how hard I had worked, or at least as the built-in consequence of a life of service, but even when I managed to meet all of my conditions for a day or two, I was so exhausted from the effort that I could not keep my eyes open. Slumber spirituality took over, and when I woke up I was right back where I started with miles to go toward the home I never quite reached.

Soon after I moved to the country, a friend from the city set out to see me and got seriously lost. These were the days before cell phones, so she was on her own with nothing but my directions and a badly out-of-date map. Already an hour later than she wanted to be, she was speeding through a little town when she saw the blue lights in her rearview mirror. I forgot to warn her that it was a speed trap. Busted, she pulled over on the shoulder of the road and had her license ready when the officer arrived at her window.

“I am so sorry,” she said, handing it to him along with her registration. “I know I was speeding, but I’ve been lost for the last forty minutes and I cannot find Tower Terrace anywhere on this map.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that too, ma’am,” he said, writing up her citation, “but what made you think that hurrying would help you find your way?”

What made any of us think that the place we are trying to reach is far, far ahead of us somewhere and that the only way to get there is to run until we drop? For Christians, at least part of the answer is that many of us have been taught to think of God’s kingdom as something outside ourselves, for which we must search as a merchant searches for the pearl of great price.

But even that points to a larger and more enduring human problem, which is the problem of mortality. With a limited number of years to do whatever it is that we are supposed to be doing here, who has time to stop?

Barbara Brown Taylor is a writer and teacher at Piedmont College in Georgia. She was ordained an Episcopal priest and writes about the life of the church—and the church of life. This excerpt is from her book called Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.


Truly Rambling on
Rory