A Quiet Life

“In that day, every one of you will invite his neighbor to sit under his vine and under his fig tree.” Zechariah 3:10

“Each of them will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, with no one to make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.” Micah 4:4

“Peace I leave with you. MY peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled.” John 14:27

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you.” 1 Thessalonians 4:11

Last year, as I was reading through Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, this simple verse and the phrase, ‘a quiet life’, grabbed my attention and launched me into some serious reflection. I realized that in all my fifty-plus years of walking with Jesus (nearly forty of those years spent in some kind of Christian ministry), I had never heard anyone preach on this verse about striving to lead a quiet life. Honestly, it didn’t take much reflection to understand why, as I looked back on the last forty years of American evangelicalism.

‘Quiet’ is the antithesis of what we’ve been told to pursue and to expect. The messages, whether in churches or conferences, were all about pursuing greatness (by serving, of course), daring to do the extraordinary, to be extraordinary, to believe for ‘great things’ and to be extreme for God. And leadership. Everything has been about church leadership – countless conferences and books all focused on the big L, even though the word rarely appears in the New Testament when instructions about our common life in Christ are given. The overarching, operative word and concept in the New Testament is service. So we’ve tried to baptize secular leadership concepts by pasting the word ‘servant’ in front of it. But it still means exactly what everyone knows in means – to be in front of a crowd (the bigger the better), on a stage, preaching or teaching or singing or doing some other performative, impressive thing. The Christian world has largely tracked with secular culture in its love of a stage, theater lights, and big spectacles.

Before you get upset with me, I believe we serve a great God who does great things, and that sometimes he calls rare individuals to do extraordinary things – but when we make ‘awesome’ and ‘extreme’ the standard to which the rest of us must aspire, we have veered way off track. And when we interpret greatness through the warped, greasy lens of our celebrity-obsessed western culture, the idea of a quiet life seems foreign. Unfortunately, for most of those who have grown up in evangelical churches over the past forty years, they’ve experienced anything and everything but a quiet life.

I served as an international worker, along with my wife and children, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ages ago, before the advent of cell phones and social media. We lived a quiet – and thanks be to God – impactful life. Yes, there were some moments of danger, excitement and a few experiences on the wild side; but for the most part, there were daily rhythms of work, rest, relationship-building, and sharing Jesus with people in humble villages, the names of which I can’t even remember. It happened mostly in obscurity. I’m was never a photographer, and film and getting it developd cost money in those days – so we don’t even have lots of photos. Then we moved back to America, where I eventually became pastor of a small neighborhood church. It was a stretching, enriching, rewarding time which I loved, mostly. But the pace of life definitely picked up speed – maybe not as much as if we’d been in one of those large, ‘successful’ churches, but it was still an adjustment for us, and not all of it healthy. After sixteen years I gave it up to go back on the mission field, this time in rural West Africa.

In the years since, I’ve had lots of conversations, some casual, some in the context of pastoral counseling, with people who grew up in the frenetic, over-committed, ‘you-can-rest-when-you’re-dead’ world of the evangelical church. Families pulled in five different directions at once, between church events, sporting events, worship team practice, committee meetings, nursery duty, ushering duty, youth group meetings, youth group outings, on and on – besides regular church services. Homes in chaos, dinners – if you can call them that – of fast food gulped down in the car on the way to something. No time to have a cookout with the neighbors, to take a quite after-dinner stroll, to sit on the couch and read books with mom and dad, or watch a movie, or to just. sit. still. And certainly no time for troubled families to sort out their dysfunctions and build something better to pass on to their children. Among all the reasons that people in their twenties and thirties – and beyond – have abandoned the church world in which they grew up, I think this is an unrecognized, but powerful reason.

Maybe I just want to have a life, an actual life with time and margin for ordinary pleasures, one that isn’t built on a fast-moving, never-ending treadmill of activity where I’m exhausted all the time. A quiet life. How would it feel, what it would it be like, to have an ordinary life of loving God and serving others through all the ordinary, daily responsibilities and pleasures that sustain our existence, minus the anxiety, the constant pressure of an overloaded schedule, without constantly running at a frantic pace? Think about it.

The world we live in is frantic, things change faster than we can keep up, and there is chaos everywhere. A 24-hour news cycle that shoves in our faces every disaster that is happening somewhere in the world, all at once – that alone ratchets up our anxiety, and gives us a sense of being vaguely responsible, to feel, to react, to respond somehow. Add to that our social media feed, where many of us are following distant strangers who post their otherwise private family life for mass consumption and engagement. We become witness to their trials, medical misadventures, business ventures, struggling children, on and on. And then we struggle to focus on the people in front us. We become absorbed in the chaos. Let me suggest, as I believe Scripture suggests, that running around with your hair on fire, living a frantic life, is not helping anybody. Wearing yourself out being at every single church event and activity is not necessarily helping anyone either. As Christ-followers, we should be the ones who walk in peace and who can bring peace, who bring a sense of calm and order and quiet confidence into the chaotic world around us – and I mean the world where we actually live and where our physical presence can truly make a difference.

Let’s look at the verse again: “Make it your ambition (strive, in other words), to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business…” Living a quiet life is something we should strive for, because the world will pull us in a hundred different directions if we allow it. How do we even begin? You should mind your own business – the few things that God has put in front of you, not the thousand things that are happening all over the world, all over the news and all over social media. Your business, your affairs, your family, your neighbors. There is plenty enough right there, and focusing on those things in faithfulness to God is the start of a well-ordered, quiet, peaceful life. That kind of life will be an oasis to those who come within its circle of influence.

The Old Testament prophets’ vision of the New Covenant life is beautiful in its simplicity: ‘Everyone one of you will invite his neighbor to sit under his vine and under his fig tree.” To sit, to relax and have a good chat. To our frenzied lives, this sounds like some kind of idyllic vacation luxury, but according to Scripture, it’s meant to be normal. It can be, if we stop striving for so many other things, and strive instead for this quiet life. It doesn’t mean there won’t be crises, urgent needs at times, and some chaos to bring into order. But if we take the time to cultivate a quiet inner life with God, supported by the simple boundaries and rhythms of a quiet daily existence, we can respond to these demands with confidence and clarity instead of panic and frenzy.

I’ll wrap up with some simple parables that Jesus told to describe how the Kingdom of God comes into the world – and it’s not with a big spectacle, a flash and a bang. In Matthew 13:31-33, Jesus takes two common, seemingly unremarkable things to make his point. The Kingdom comes into the world like a mustard seed planted in a garden, or like yeast mixed into bread dough. These things are small, ordinary, everyday things. But they have life in them. When the seed is planted, or the yeast is mixed into the flour, something begins to happen slowly, imperceptibly at first. But there is a steady, humble growth and multiplication as the life in the seed and the life in the yeast do what they are meant to do. With time and patience, their impact far exceeds their size and appearance, so that the environments in which they grow are transformed. And that is the power – and the mission – of a quiet life.

Those who know me personally might say “OK, you’re talking about this quiet life, but you’ve done some extreme things in the course of following Jesus.” But I don’t see it that way. I’ve just tried to do the next thing in front of me, and I certainly haven’t done it all perfectly, or even with excellence according to the elevated standards of some, that’s for sure! The fact that some of those things took me to remote places in Africa, and sometimes to ‘dangerous’ places, is beside the point. At the start of this year, I found myself riding a motorcycle for three hours, over very rough terrain, into a war zone, to sit and visit with people who had experienced lots of trauma. I listened, I offered some biblical counsel and some practical ways they could manage the ongoing stress, and let them know they weren’t alone. I wasn’t attempting to do something ‘great’ or something ‘extreme’ for God. It was just part of my job that particular week. The next week I was back in a cubicle writing reports and responding to emails. I’m learning to seek, to savor, and to lean into that quiet life, because I believe that in the end, that is the life that reflects God’s kingdom. That is a life worth inviting others into. And that is the kind of life worth striving for.