5 Reasons to Stop and Savor This Summer

 If you are an American Christian in 2018 there is a sad likelihood that it has been some time since you paused to savor anything.

And that’s not just a shame: it’s shameful. If God is the giver of every good and perfect gift, we are all too often the ingrateful and distracted recipients of those gifts. We might prefer that the sandwich taste good, but we also insist on eating it in so hurried and distracted a fashion that we scarcely taste it.

The Christian Discipline of Savoring
 This is a problem for at least three reasons:

1. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

First, our inability to pause and savor often stems from a strange and unwise resistance to the limitations of our condition. We multitask and race through the events of our lives as though it were a test where we might get bonus points for finishing first. We’re more concerned with getting things done than with getting things right. And much of our desperate cramming of things into a day is fueled by the insecurity that we are missing out: missing out on the news, on the latest episode, on the inside jokes.

    2. Sensation Overload
Second, God wants us to be sensitive to stimuli. It is Satan who desires that we be made numb and indifferent. And what he has accomplished through idolatry he is just as pleased to do through devices and a relentless pacing of life. Our frenetic lives and our blunted senses serve Satan’s purposes better than those of the God who created us.

    3. Experiencing Grace in the Everyday
Third, the good gifts of God are means of grace to those who receive them. The delicate reach of a twig, the late day sunlight completing its journey in rosy triumph on the rough trunk of a white pine, the way the neighbor’s cat stretches on its morning stoop in what might be worship. The way cool water perfectly satisfies the parched tongue, the way lettuce tastes better for having been crunched between one’s teeth, the pleasure we might take in bathing and being clean. These are all things that have been salvaged from the shipwreck of Eden and as such are means of grace. They make the desert island on which Adam’s sons and Eve’s daughters washed up more survivable. But they also point us away from the desert island to the Promised Land across the waters and to the One who will, in time, bring us there.

5 Ways to Stop and Savor
    So if we agree that we would be better disciples and happier people if we savored more what must we do to resist the tide of our culture?

1. Stop multitasking. When you eat, for instance, do nothing else, taking care to taste the food in your mouth. Be present and aware in every moment.
2. Express gratitude to God. If you particularly enjoy a song on the radio, thank Him for it. If the breeze feels particularly good, thank Him for it. Gratitude heightens the pleasure we take in the things for which we are grateful.
3. Pay attention to your senses. Do inventories of all that you can hear, of every scent you can detect, every impression made on your skin. You are an embodied creature and God loves and saves you as such.
4. Spend time with children. They are black belts in savoring.
5. Be more easily satisfied. The person who has taken the time to read and really enjoy a good book is richer than the person who has filled his personal library with volumes and volumes that he has barely skimmed, even if the book he has read is the only one he possesses.

Do you have any tips or suggestions about how to practice the godly, Christian discipline of savoring?

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