Our lives can easily take us to the brink of burnout. The pace we live at is often destructive. The lack of margin is debilitating. We are worn out. In all of this, the problem before us is not just the frenetic pace we live at but what gets pushed out from our lives as a result; that is, life with God.
. . .
As long as we remain enslaved to a culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction, we will not be the people God longs for us to be. We desperately need a spirituality that roots us in a different way.
— Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life
[Thanks for reading. This post continues our series Verses for Vocation: Poems on the Sacred in Everyday Life and Work. Check out our other posts on faith and work and spiritual growth for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox.]
The Evening Commute
I thought about leaving at 4:30.
It’s the summer, after all. Most cubicles are empty.
August clouds draw my eye from Windows to the windows.
It’s best to beat the traffic, I muse, and ponder a breezy evening and ice cream at home.
But no—I forgot. If I leave now, there won’t be time
Before Thursday’s meeting because of Thursday’s other meeting.
So I click through and make two more calls.
(Will these particular prospects produce any progress? It’s always hard to say.)
It’s not exactly self-pity that I feel. I came in at 9. What then?
FOMO? Failure? The whiff of greener grass?
I have no answers yet by the time I shut it down, grab my lunch box, descend to the lot.
Shade shifts in eight hours and my Outback is an oven.
And—ah, yes—there’s construction on Kirk.
My sticky note reminder catches me halfway home.
I’m already past the store, so I’ll have to go too-far South now.
I clock this revelation at 5:25 and ponder what stuffy evening lies ahead.
Sure enough, the store is out! So, my Odyssey prolonged,
The Outback and I stop and start and stop and start through the rush.
Can you feel the air pressing in on every side?
All of us are packed in now, a single lane of congested souls.
What would it take to breathe easy, even here in the rush?
To be hard pressed, but somehow whole, not crushed?
Let there be a still place inside of me, where I am always home.
Let the wind blow. Let the wind blow through me.
Explanatory Notes
- “FOMO”: Fear Of Missing Out
- “my Odyssey prolonged”: An allusion Homer’s Odyssey
- “pressing in on every side”; “hard pressed, but somehow whole, not crushed?”: Allusions to 2 Corinthians 4:8
Series image: The Stevedores in Arles (Coal Barges) by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.
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