Slow Living for Women of Faith

Our life with God is meant to have a rhythm, a cadence.
-Keri Wyatt Kent, Rest: Living in Sabbath Simplicity

The Slow Living Series

This post is part of a slow living series that can help you get cozy with the slow living lifestyle & finally, conquer mornings.

Here are the other posts in the series ...

The Slow Living Lifestyle and Philosophy
How Do You Want Your Mornings to Feel?
Tea and Meditation: Tea Ritual Ideas
The Slow Morning Solution for Night Owls

To download all of the slow living posts in a free printable pdf & bonus getting started checklist, plus extra bonus information about slow living for families, go to The Slow Living Series.

Finding Our Own Pace & Cadence

In this post, I want to take the slow living lifestyle philosophy and apply it to our life of faith and our relationship with God.

I believe that we are meant to learn from Jesus, how to find our own rhythm of living our lives and pausing to rest.

How to act and then, rest. How to serve and then, pause. Just like he did.

But what sometimes comes up for women as we think about slowing life down and taking time to pause and rest is this fear that we won't do enough (or be enough). We often define ourselves by how busy we are, by everything we are trying to accomplish.

As Christian women, we are called away from defining ourselves in any way that is not ultimately about God. And His is the voice that should inform how we spend our time.

When we strip away every circumstantial identity — writer, mother, wife — we are left with the only identity that can never be in question: I am a woman of God. When we define ourselves as women and men of God, ...our worth is no longer in question. - Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow

We must learn the rhythm that God has wired into us and to begin, we must pause. - Keri Wyatt Kent

The most important reason to pause, and to shift into a slow living lifestyle is to make sure that we slow down long enough and regularly enough not to miss God's voice.

That still, small voice is most easily heard when our hearts, minds and bodies are quiet. It's much harder to hear those whispers above the noise of our busy lives.

In my own life, when I was too busy, I was missing something. And we need God's wisdom too much to take a chance on missing it.

I love the way church sermons can sound like they were written for us. But that's not the same as the voice we hear in our own quiet times, speaking softly just to us, telling us exactly what we need right in that moment.

But God's voice is available all the time - not just during those moments when we spend time dedicated to Him.

In order to hear it, we can't do one thing while thinking about another. We can't live half in and half out of each moment, already mentally headed for the next thing.

That be here, now thing is for all of us. And it's imperative, because we have a connection with God to protect. An openness to hearing what we need to hear and to being shown what we might be missing.

3 Ways to Shift into a Slow Living,
Listening Connection with God

(1) Unhurried Quiet Times: in our quiet times with God, we can start our days letting God lavish us with His love for us (1 John 1:3) and then, we can lavish with love each part of our day, one thing at a time.

Bring your journal, so you can take notes. Write down the thoughts and insights and guidance you receive, and from time to time, go back to re-read it, to see how they are being woven into a story. And to make sure you are seeing the bigger picture.

(2) The Pause in Between: after fully engaging with each new moment of our day, we can pause. Refill, pour out, pause. Then, repeat, letting go as you pause, before moving on to the next thing.

The idea that we should rush, rush rush and hurry up to get there did not come from God, and it's hurting us. Slow living offers us a chance to honor the way God made us and slow down long enough to listen carefully to hear His specific call around developing our own pace.

Start with your morning quiet time routine. An upcoming post today will say more about the concept of slow mornings, but not address quiet times specifically.

How can you create a morning quiet time routine that is slow and unhurried, and gives you plenty of time to hang out with God? Make sure to give yourself enough time and freedom in your quiet times.

(3) Taking Time to Rest on the Sabbath: take a look at how you spend your Sabbath day. It's so easy to use it as a day to finish our chores, or get more done.

Do you use it to rest? That's our calling.

My blog posts tomorrow and the following day with be about creating Sabbath simplicity, which is a way of honoring the call to rest fully on the Sabbath.

When you can create a lifestyle that both honors the Sabbath and gives you moments to pause throughout the day (including your time with God), you will be honoring God's call to rest and leaning into your own God-made pace and rhythm.

What's the first change you feel called to make? Let me know in a comment.

See you next time!

Love, Jeanine