Festina lente is an old Latin motto that means “make haste slowly.” The idea is that it is better to act with due diligence and attention to detail and avoid mistakes and finish a task more quickly overall. Doing a task correctly the first time is faster than trying to cut corners and having to go back and fix all your mistakes. This is a general principle that applies everywhere: excellence at work and school, and ongoing tasks like parenting, marriage, growing in Christ, and building Christian culture.
While we should be persistent, militant, and ambitious for growth and holiness and success, Christians should also care about the process as much as the final product. You could drag your kids through family worship or a classical education and they could hate you at the end of it. It would have been better to do less with joy and win their hearts then lose their hearts on the altar of some check list you made up or saw on a web site one time.
Think of this principle as the militance of the Ents. Remember in the Two Towers (not the movie version mind you), the Ents are ancient tree creatures full of the wisdom of the ages and very thoughtful and careful. But once they have made up their minds to go to war, their voices rise in a great war song, and their drums beat, and their anger is aroused with great power.
One of the great lies the Church has believed in our day is that sentiment is supreme, feelings are most powerful. But the Bible teaches that: As a man thinks, so is he (Prov. 23:7). Sentiment is fast, feelings can surge quickly and easily. But wisdom is slower and more careful, and in the end far more powerful. Knowing Christ, coming to understand His truth and goodness and beauty – those foundational convictions, or presuppositions, are like tectonic plates, roots that go down deep, that move you and the world around you.
Growing in Christ and in His wisdom is the powerful working of the Spirit, but the Bible teaches that it ordinarily comes through knowledge and understanding. So the godly must be slow to anger, slow to speak, learners, students, people of the Word and words, lovers of poetry, and as we marinate in the truth, in the good things of God, in the beauty of holiness, God is forming us into a great Entish army: builders, inventors, creators, writers, fathers, mothers, and worshipers who are pulling down every stronghold.
Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
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