Stop in The Name of Love

The new apartment is full of unfamiliar echoes. I keep forgetting where I put the toothbrush, and the light in the kitchen falls in a way that shifts my sense of time. Even the simplest gesture—a turn of the wrist at the bathroom sink—reminds me that change is more than logistics. It’s an interruption of habit, a summons to notice what has been invisible.

This week, my body has called the tune. Sleep slips away, routines come undone. In the past, I would have fought these disruptions—turned them into problems to solve, obstacles to overcome. But something in me has been listening to what we’ve been teaching each other in worship and in circles of care. The practice of pause, of treating the moment not as a crisis but as an invitation. Of offering kindness to what is, rather than only what should be.

We know how to stop for grief. When loss arrives, meals and flowers and ready volunteers appear, our calendars yield, our priorities brighten. Stopping is what we do best when pain is acute. But the deeper lesson—the one love teaches—is how to stop before crisis. To step off the moving walkway when the invitation comes not from loss, but from love. The discipline of interruption is a spiritual act, and, at its best, a practice of equity.

This challenge is ancient. There’s a story in the Gospel of John: a crowd gathers at the edge of healing waters. The tradition says an angel will come, and the first to touch the water is restored. But a man sits apart—sick for years, unable to move himself to the pool. Jesus sees him, and the miracle is not only in the healing, but in the question: “Where are your people? Who is here to carry you?” The ache of the story is not just the man’s pain, but the absence of community—no one stopping long enough to notice, to carry, to stand with him at the edge. For two thousand years, that question lingers. Where are your people, when you cannot move yourself to what you need? Who’s supporting your dream?

You want to know how the world stays the same? Keep moving. Keep doing what’s comfortable, what’s familiar, what’s just a little easier than slowing down for someone else. You want to know how it changes? Notice who’s waiting at the edge. Let your plan be interrupted, and let yourself be changed by the inconvenience.

August arrives with its surge: programs relaunch, schools beckon, the city’s machinery stirs. Injustice thrives on our busyness—on the thousand chances we have to look away, to keep pace, to measure worth by efficiency and comfort. But liberation gathers in the places where we stop long enough to listen, to be caught off guard, to let love make a claim on our schedule. Budgets are moral documents. So is your attention. What and whom you make room for is your actual gospel. What you neglect speaks with just as much clarity.

Every stop is a start at the pausing place. It is where another’s story starts to slow your own. It is where it dawns on us how to commune with courage to realize our unrealistic dreams of liberation, where we start staying put in the face of inconvenience or discomfort, where we start to resource our creative impulse to grow with our collective power to a scale we were too timid to unshelve. In these pauses, love arrives in ways once beyond us.

The toothbrush, misplaced, waits for me to notice—just as someone waits by the water’s edge, hoping for recognition, for presence, for a pause that might change everything. August invites a return to the details, to the people and places that ask us to slow down and see what’s truly there. In these moments, we build the world we long for—a world where love finds us awake, attentive, willing to make room.

If you want to be ready, you don’t have to be perfect. You have to be present, and be still.

The end.