Pause

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be  

quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because

human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.  

James 1: 19-20 

Angry voices are everywhere right now. Most of you know I teach in a public high school, and the  students are angry. They are getting in fights in numbers we’ve never seen before. Their fuses are short. Mine is too. I catch myself feeling proud of myself for being very calm and then losing my temper with my children, my students, myself without pausing. 

And yet, Love is slow to anger. 

I read recently in a novel a character described as a person who pauses, who considers before he acts, who has space between thought and action. He pauses to think before reacting. He pauses to consider before putting up his fists. He pauses to consider the sides of the story, the ramifications before responding curtly. 

This pause, this deliberate slowness, is not always valued by our culture of glorified busyness. I think about God’s people as people who are called to pause in many ways. We are asked to pause in Sabbath rest. We are asked to pause from our longing to control and be humble. We are asked to pause in our fear and remember God’s sovereignty. We are called to pause the anger and be peacemakers. And I know I am unable to do this on my own. 

I hope you’ll pray the prayer of Saint Francis with me this week: 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: 

where there is hatred, let me sow  

love; where there is injury, pardon;  

where there is doubt, faith; 

where there is despair, hope; 

where there is darkness, light; 

where there is sadness, joy. 

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek  

to be consoled as to console, 

to be understood as to understand,  

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive, it is in  

pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in  

dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen. 

—Mary Sloan