Photo by jenny downing

By Ann Chen

I’ve always been somebody who’s rushing from one thing to the next.

In my grade school days, I often would be the first one done, often forgoing neatness to finish faster. At home, my mom always commented that I didn’t seem to want to stay still and rarely just sat down and rested, going from youth group to movies with friends to working on the paper at school.

As an adult, I saw my ability to hone my multi-tasking skills to be one of my greatest strengths. At one point, I was teaching middle school full-time, taking grad school classes part-time, serving every weekend at my church as well as another parachurch ministry, and training for a marathon. My schedule was packed to the brim, and despite nearly getting an ulcer (not exaggerating), I felt good about my accomplishments.

I am clearly a product of a culture that highly values busyness, productivity, and efficiency and couldn’t imagine doing life another way and justified it by saying there was so much work to do for the Kingdom. In the predominantly Asian American circles I ran in, it was easy to find others who had similar values and paces of life, so I thought nothing of the way I chose to live my life.

Then I moved to Africa.

As you can probably imagine, life moves slow in rural Africa. Painfully slow. A visit to the restaurant might invite a wait of two hours. A car piece I ordered last November still hadn’t arrived 7 months later. Most of my local friends would spend an entire day walking 2 hours to town and back to go to one office or another, only to need to return the next day because they weren’t able to do what they needed. Nobody thought anything of these things. It’s just the way they were.

I began to change in my mindset. A day where two things were completed was considered an incredibly successful day. As I visited my friends in the villages, I began to enjoy just sitting around and doing absolutely nothing with them. I found myself very intentionally scheduling in rest times and not feeling any guilt in doing so. I found that my life began to reflect slower rhythms, and found myself feeling quite uncomfortable when things got even slightly busy.

I realized that even with this pace, I saw God move just as much, if not more than before. I was able to see God moving in my life, in the lives of ministry partners around me, and in the lives of my friends in the villages. It looked so different from my previous life, but it was so beautiful and deep. It wasn’t one meeting after the next. There were no one-hour appointments. There wasn’t a fight to schedule the next program or strategy in place, yet God was changing and transforming people. All without the busyness and hecticness that I had known before.

As I return back to America, there’s a part of me that desperately prays and hopes this change in me will remain even as I enter into the rat race yet again. My previously subconscious belief that God wanted me to do more for him actually works against the gospel of Christ that says that it’s about what He’s done for me, not what I can do for Him. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see the beauty and benefit of a slower-paced life, and to be able to trust that He will accomplish everything that He wants to do through me, as I rest in the easy yoke and light burden of the Lord.

Ann Chen was recently serving in Malawi, working to see a discipleship making movement raise up amongst the Yao.  She is an International Staff member with Epicentre Church and has a degree in Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary.