Wednesday, February 12, 2020
“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” (James 1:19, New Living Translation)  

                Another day, another donkey.

                This time, I am reading the exquisitely written book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, by Andy Merrifield. It chronicles his leisurely-paced, multi-day journey by foot through the Haute-Auvergne region in southern France. His companion is a pack donkey by the name of Gribouille. The subtitle of the book is “finding tranquility in a chaotic world.” He is fascinated by the behaviour, the character, the spirit and the soul of his donkey and the lessons it taught him along the way about how to react to the messy world in which we live.

                One piece of those lessons is that “time slows down amid donkeys.” A person has to walk at the pace the donkeys set. It does little good to prod or try to hurry along a donkey. A donkey seems to walk  slowly so as to absorb the world he is experiencing in the moment and will not be rushed.

                He wrote: “If only we could slow down! The rush of contemporary life overwhelms our ability to observe, to hear, to step back and wonder, to meditate.”

                So many of us are in a rush. We honk at the slow driver ahead of us. We tap our toes impatiently when waiting for customer service. We want our fast food and we want it now. We are so busy, no time to stop. We have so much to do, and it needs to have been done yesterday!  Kids are in a rush to grow up. Couples are in a rush to have their family. People are in a rush to get to the top of their careers and vocations. Some can’t wait to retire.

                A donkey expert had told Merrifield that he would have to enter a donkey’s way of doing things. “You can’t make a donkey walk faster; you can’t do things any faster with a donkey. We have to learn to go at its pace.”

                Sometimes, I am  re-discovering a better, richer, more deliberate pace in my retirement. It isn’t easy. I have spent most of my life, it seems, “on the-run”, extremely task-oriented, ready and eager for the next thing, impatient with myself and with others. It hasn’t been easy to stop and smell the roses. But there are more times now  that I will take a deep breath and take in what is transpiring around me and intentionally enjoy the moment, and consciously become aware of the significance of what is happening – the giggle of a grandchild, a conversation with Susan, the silliness of one of the dogs, a song on the radio, a good book, a crossword puzzle, sitting by a lake and watching a sunset. Breathe in, breathe out. Life is short enough; I really don’t need to race through it. Tranquility is a wonderful gift, even if elusive at times.

                “Things work differently with a donkey on a dirt trail…,” wrote Merrifield. “It’s the gift of relishing the rhythm of precise steps, of treading slower yet going farther, of reassuring the present moment, making it endure longer, stretching it out in all its glorious fullness.”

                Our text above reminds us there is a poignant merit in a slowness to express such things as anger, insults, tweeting things that diminish and belittle others, rushing to judgment, adding more chaos to our world and the lives of others in the process. The writer was probably inspired by the several OT texts which avow that God is a God “a God of compassion and mercy, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 86:15, NLT)

Let our moments in which we love, care, help, share steep slowly and long in the ways we live and interact with others.

“You body language needs to slowed down with a donkey. You need to move like you’re walking through waist-deep water, with steady, not jerky movements. A careful, slower body language reassures a donkey, lets him gain confidence in you: small slow steps towards trust.”

                Small, slow steps to Love.
Dale