A Different Kind of Slow Saturday Morning
I Completely Overlooked God in One of the Most Famous Passages in the Bible
I feel like we should talk about the slow Saturday morning for a second.
You know the one. Back porch. Steaming mug of coffee. Sun coming up. Birds chirping. Quitness…
I’m going to need you to hold that image very loosely, because I’m about to wake you up to reality for most of us.
For a lot of the people I know, and honestly, for me, the slow Saturday morning looks a little more like digging through the clean laundry basket you haven’t folded since Tuesday looking for the one article of clothing that certain child must have, having children physically climbing your body like you’re a jungle gym while you try to read one sentence of your devotional, and somehow being a short-order cook for four different breakfast requests before 8 am.
And yet, I think that while it might now sound as appealing as morning one, I think it is exactly the place life meets us. We’re just too busy chasing morning number one to notice.
I had to come to realize that waiting for the perfect slow Saturday was making me miss that slow is really a perspective. It’s what you make it.
Which is why I walk.
My walks are my sacred, quiet, meets-with-God time.
It might not be a back porch or a hot mug of tea.
And yes, it might look like being swarmed by bugs with sweat pooling down your back, but I think there’s still something holy in it.
Over the last few years, I’ve learned to be careful of my perspective, because it’s often my expectation of what something needs to look like that makes me miss everything it actually is. I limit myself. I spend more time comparing my life to the curated version of someone else’s that I miss the beauty of creating my own.
All of that to say, walking is more than a metric for me. Yes, I’m still promoting getting your steps in this summer, even counting them, but I also hope it’s so much more and so much bigger. And that inspired me to encourage you to make your walk be your own sacred space.
Which, if you’d told me five years ago that my quiet time with God would involve bugs swarming me and a hill I deeply regret, I would not have believed you. And yet, here we are.
This summer, I added a weekly devotional to The Walking Club.
I say "devotional" lightly because it’s more of a conversation about what God is pointing out to me that week. What I’m learning. A prayer for your walk. And an encouragement to try something simple and kind of countercultural.
To walk with God in the physical sense and to grow with him in the spiritual sense.
Hear me out.
The first devotional comes from Genesis 3:8:
“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”
Now, in full transparency: I have read this passage more times than I can count. But I always read it through the lens of the second half of that verse:
“and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”
With the focus on Adam and Eve. On what they did, where they were hiding, the shame and the fig leaves, and all of it.
I completely overlooked God. And specifically, that God was walking.
WALKING!
The God who spoke light into existence. Who separated the waters. Who breathed life into dust, just casually strolling through the garden in the cool of the evening.
I had never once pictured God taking a stroll. And yes, there are different beliefs on whether this was a physical manifestation or simply the sense of his presence moving through the space. But regardless, there is something that absolutely wrecks me about this image.
Because many scholars believe, based on the original translation, that this wasn’t a one-time thing. This was a pattern. It was a routine. Before everything went sideways, Adam and Eve may have walked with him regularly. They knew the walk and loved it.
That they were created for it.
I know how that sounds. Cheesy. Overly simple. The kind of thing you’d see on a tote bag at a Christian bookstore.
And yet here we are. Talking about God walking in Genesis 3:8, because sometimes the most ordinary things turn out to be the most holy.
You can listen to the first devotional here
I hope it encourages you. To see beyond the metrics into something bigger. To take the ordinary and let it be extraordinary. And to know that God doesn’t need your slow Saturday morning to be with you, he’s also walking with you.
The Walking Club officially begins June 1st, which is in TWO DAYS! Doors close June 7th. I would love to have you join this community of women who are not only building physical health, but bringing it together with mental and spiritual health. Learning to live in the bigness of life.
And yes, it all happens through a simple walk.
Your sneakers are waiting. And so is God!
I’ll see you inside!
P.S. Not sure what you’re signing up for? Try it out for free this week. Log some steps, join the conversations happening in the community, and see if this is your people. I promise, we’re not scary!