When you come home, how present are you with your family? Are you there, but you're not there, your mind's somewhere else? You're busy in your mind, your body's there, but you are not present and engaged in connecting, so children feel father is still out to lunch, he's out at business. Your wife feels you're not there. Why? Because you haven't actually come home yet. Your mind is elsewhere, there's no attention being given, there's no focus on the people who are there, so you don't enter their relationship, they don't enjoy your presence, and you don't enjoy theirs either. You've got to make a decision on the way home to start to slow down, so you can enter your home and enjoy it. It's the same in the workplace. We get so busy in the workplace, we actually miss the people around us that God called us to minister to. We're not aware of them. We're aware of our task list, and this is the pressure the world brings on, and the Bible says in the Book of Daniel: it'll get worse in the last times, so we're living in a day of accelerated pressure, and in that you have to learn how to slow down, and become aware of people; aware of those around you that you love; aware of yourself, what's going on inside me.
Some people, when there's stuff going on inside them, they just distract themselves with more busyness. They don't want to face what's in them, but if you're feeling pain, you need to acknowledge it. It's your pain. If you're feeling disappointment, it's your disappointment, it won't go away. You've got to face it and resolve it. If you're feeling pressure then you need to acknowledge it and face it. If you're feeling a struggle or discouragement, or you don't know what to do, or you're a bit lost, don't just get another DVD out and watch it, don't just open another bottle of wine, don't just do the things to distract you. Face what's there, and come to the Lord instead of trying to control the pain by controlling your world. We need to learn how to connect with what's happening. If you want to find out what's going on, you've got to listen to the what's happening inside you, and become conscious and aware of what's going on in there, so you can talk to the Lord about it, get His wisdom, get His help. Otherwise you just carry on, and so many believers carry on, and never stop to look at the inner world, so they get full of resentment and anger and manipulation, all kinds of stuff, and never stop to look at what is going on.
The Holy Spirit's wanting to grow you up out of that stuff, but if you won't slow down, He has to build a wall in your way, so you hit the wall head on, and then when your nose is bleeding and you're feeling the pain, then you stop and say: maybe there's something wrong. As soon as it stops bleeding, you don't feel the hurt, hey, back again, we're on that rush again; and that's how some people live their life. They're just in a cycle of things happening that never change, because they never stop to find out what's going on. Then the third one, of course we need to become aware of, we need to become aware of the presence of God. Slow down and become aware of God. If you don't slow down, you can't become aware of God. You're not a human doing, you're a human being. You're not a machine, so you've got to love and value yourself, and enjoy the journey. Are there pressures? Heaps of them, but what you do is what counts, on the inside.
Some people live their life - and I'll just put it in a simple nutshell - you're consumed with trying to control your world. To slow down means you have to say this: God is control, and I don't need to be in control of the world. It was here before I came. It'll be here after I leave, and I am not God, I don't have to be in charge - so I can stop. I can let God take care of the world, while I just connect with God. That's kind of deep isn't it, but it's actually where people are. Even though you haven't really thought it through, what we actually do is, we carry on like we are in charge of the world, and we're determined to control that world, because you never know when it'll fall apart! Something around us might happen, so we're driven by fear, and the belief God can't be trusted, and we are the only ones can be trusted with our world - so now when people disrupt our world, we get angry, get upset, we lose our cool, all kinds of stuff is going on, because we are God!