Moving Slowly
“If you’re always racing to the next moment, what happens to the one you’re in?” Nanette Mathews
January 20th, 2025
📍Magdeburg, Germany 🇩🇪
Grüße aus der Wildnis!
Have you ever encountered something so profound that it changed you? I have, on numerous occasions and in different ways, had transcendental experiences of God and myself—a close intimacy of knowing and being known in a way that is hard to put into words. I had another of those experiences last week in Berlin when I visited The Feuerle Collection for a private showing and incense ceremony.
To learn all of the details about the gallery and the incense ceremony (including more pics), check out this blog post. For the purposes of this letter, I want to highlight how I met myself and try to do so with words, although this experience left me speechless.
The foundation of this expertly curated and designed masterpiece is experiencing art and design through the senses and emotions they evoke inside you. So often in life, we tend to view art as a commodity outside of ourselves, and this was anything but that—it was a full immersion.
Something interesting happens when our senses are deprived of certain stimuli, such as light and sound. This is even more true when the stimuli of time and hurry are also removed, as I witnessed last week. In this unadulterated environment, I met myself again.
The incense room is dimly lit and silent except for our breath and the footsteps of my shadow guide. We were asked not to wear perfume or heavily scented products that could interfere with the pure essence of the three woods we were about to “taste.”
Once I was seated to the right of the Master of Ceremony at the specially designed incense table, wearing the black linen kimono and slippers provided to me, her assistant (who I will refer to as my shadow guide) begins the ceremony by walking in a wide arc around the table, one slow step at a time. She pauses briefly between each movement with intention, methodology, and purpose, lacking any hurry. Her dance ushers us into a new rhythm.
I could feel in my body that time had slowed down, and I became fully aware of the busyness in my mind because I was watching the movements and thinking, “Why is she moving so slowly?” It quickly dawns on me that this is the moment at which you are meant to come face-to-face with yourself, the whole point of the voiceless immersion.
With the absence of hurried multi-tasking and words, like so much of my day-to-day has become, I came face-to-face with the reality of my life through the discomfort of this moment—that I live in a near-constant state of hurry. Only when things became uncomfortably slow did I begin to notice how fast I was moving through life.
The Lord was showing me that busyness and multi-tasking have become my normal again, and the unhurried pace of this experience illuminated for me that I needed to slow down. To savor. More “being” and less “doing.”
My friends, this is so much an illustration of what God is calling all of us to: a life free of hurry, a life lived at a sustainable pace, driven by God’s Love and grace, not the speed of production and worry.
If you, too, find yourself moving at a pace of worry and hurry, I would like to invite you to our first Loto Reads Book Club gathering on February 1st. We will discuss John Mark Comer’s book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Even if you haven’t read the book, come.
Until then, enjoy some pics from my time in Berlin 👇 Included is the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, The Holocaust Memorial, Brandenberg Gate, and much more.
Blessings of His peace and slowness over you this week.
With Love,
Jennifer
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