Kodzo, a good friend of mine, asked a question I’ve had for years. What is God’s pace?
The first time this question plagued me was when I heard Michael Todd preach about striving versus striding. You can strive, push, hustle, endeavour to make things happen. Or you can stride, moving at the pace required of you, trusting the One who is leading you.
One illustration has stayed with me. Jesus was on His way to the house of Jairus, a synagogue leader whose daughter was dying, when a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years touched His garment and was healed. Jesus stopped to ask who had touched Him. There was an urgent need ahead of Him, yet He gave His attention to the person in front of Him. I imagine being Jairus in that moment. My daughter is dying, and we’re stopping to ask who touched You?
In 2026, about eight years after hearing that teaching, I looked at my life and realised I was striding. I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened. But I knew the journey had been excruciating. So I’ll attempt to capture what that journey was like. And Kodzo, I hope you’re ready.
The most important thing I’ve discovered about striding is having no agenda of your own that you are unwilling to surrender. That, I think, is the secret to pace.
Speed is an interesting idea. We measure it by the amount of ground covered per unit of time. But towards what? You can measure how fast you’re moving without knowing where you’re going. You cannot decide whether you’re moving fast enough until you know what you’re trying to get to, and why.
A few years ago, at the christening of a good friend’s daughter, we got into a conversation about young Christians and ambition. My friend said you couldn’t be Christian and ambitious. I was offended on behalf of all Christians. Are we leaving ambition to everyone else? They get to build big businesses, create movements, change the world, and we just sit and play small?
That evening, I reached into the Bible and started pulling out examples of people who had done great things. Two of my favourites: Joseph and Daniel. Young people in powerful political positions in some of the most advanced civilisations of their time. Are you trying to tell me they had no ambition?
It sounded like I had won the argument. Then I went back and revisited the stories. I have since been a little shy of the guy who was so sure of himself that evening.
Joseph didn’t have a ten-year career plan that landed him at the helm of Egypt’s economic affairs. Neither did Daniel devise a route to becoming an adviser to kings. Both were taken into captivity. The circumstances that set them on those journeys were circumstances they would hardly have chosen.
Of course, that doesn’t establish that they had no desires of their own. Joseph wanted to get out of prison. He asked the cupbearer to remember him. And when he stood before Pharaoh, he proposed a plan for responding to the famine. There was thought, initiative and skill in what he did. But the story I had reached for as evidence of personal ambition was hardly a story of a man executing his own carefully designed rise to power.
What stood out when I read again was their faithfulness. They knew their God, were diligent with what was in front of them, and fought to live by His ways, even at their own expense. Sometimes that obedience put them in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes those situations became the setting for their rise. But they couldn’t have known how it would all turn out while they were living through it.
I had pointed to where they ended up without paying enough attention to how they got there.
So, the question again. Where are you going, and why? What are you doing, and why?
Here is my attempt at a formula for pace, flawed as I already know it will be. Know your God. Know thyself. Be diligent. Keep His ways.
1. Know your God
This is a very Christian conversation. Kodzo is Christian. If you’re not Christian, or more so not religious, we would need to have a separate conversation about the beliefs underneath what I’m saying.
The Christian claim is that there is a Creator who made all this with intent, including the individual. That your existence has a purpose within His purposes, and that the talents and abilities you have belong somewhere in that. If you believe that, truly believe it, then you must reckon with the idea that your life isn’t entirely yours to direct as you please.
That is where this starts to get uncomfortable.
Most modern discourse around living, and specifically business, centres on personal ambition. We are the captains of our ships, the masters of our souls. We decide what we want, make a plan, and set about getting it. But we hardly interrogate what comes before all that. These desires, these abilities, where do they come from? And does having a desire automatically make its fulfilment the purpose of my life?
An honest inquiry as a Christian must include a willingness to put your own agenda down long enough to ask what your Creator intends. To become interested in Him, in His purposes, and in why He may have made you.
I wish I could say I arrived at this through some deliberate, orderly process. I didn’t. I only started taking these questions seriously after I had come to the end of myself. After I had given my all and watched my abilities produce far less than I expected. After I had hit walls I couldn’t explain and won battles I couldn’t explain either. Only then did I begin to realise I wasn’t in as much control as I thought.
We could spend ten more paragraphs on that alone. I have spent much of this year exploring the relationship between free will, agency and God’s purposes. But for this conversation, the thing you must come to terms with is the limit of your control. You cannot guarantee where your effort will take you. And if you believe there is a God whose purposes your life belongs to, it makes sense to seek to know Him.
Daniel 11:32 speaks of people who know their God being strong and doing exploits. I have often been interested in the exploits. The knowing deserves at least as much attention.
2. Know thyself
The second issue with trying to build anything in today’s world is that the few people presented as successful become templates for everyone else. Any attempt to improve your ability to execute will likely leave you feeling that who you are isn’t enough. You must become one of the templates.
At least, that is how I felt.
But you are not the same as other people. I know I’m saying something obvious. Still, it is possible to agree with that statement and spend years organising your life as though it weren’t true. Your nature, your abilities, your likes and dislikes, the things you find easy and the things you find difficult, are all information. If you believe you were made with intent, they are clues worth paying attention to.
That includes your flaws, although recognising a limitation is different from excusing everything you do. Some things need work. Some things need accepting. Knowing yourself involves learning which is which.
Many of us think we can be anything. We cannot. You have a particular life, a particular set of abilities, a particular history. You can develop considerably, but the person doing that developing will still be you.
This personal inquiry, paired with the inquiry into the divine, is crucial. Who am I? Who made me? What might He intend for this person He has made? Your answers may take time to become clear. But even beginning to ask the questions changes what you consider worth pursuing and how you think you ought to pursue it.
For me, that alone took my foot off the gas in a significant way. There were things I had been rushing towards because other people seemed to be getting there. Once I began to examine whether they belonged in my life at all, their urgency started to disappear.
Knowing God and knowing yourself become the basis on which you decide how to move and what is worth moving towards. And both forms of knowing will need to deepen as you go.
3. Be diligent
The first two steps may leave you feeling that you have no control. But you know that isn’t entirely true. You can choose whether to get up when you need to. Whether to study. Whether to give your best to the work you have accepted. You still have agency, within the limits of your circumstances, your abilities, your responsibilities and a host of other things.
So what will you do with it?
Since we’re talking about achievement here, let’s be more specific. What will you do with the work in front of you?
If knowing God and knowing yourself are the beliefs you hold, diligence is one of the ways you practise them. Your work becomes active inquiry. You learn something about your abilities by using them. You learn something about your character when the work becomes difficult. And you have somewhere concrete to practise the trust and obedience you claim to believe in.
Joseph and Daniel took on the challenges in front of them in circumstances they hadn’t chosen. Their abilities were useful there. They did not have to reach the positions we remember them for before they had something to offer.
Interpret the dreams of servants as well as kings. The servant in front of you has a need, and you have an ability that may help. That is already a reason to use it. You don’t need to know whether this particular act will become part of your success story.
Meet your deadlines. Give the work your best shot. Deliver on time. Write the best essay you can with what you know. Give the best customer service you can. And as you learn more, do better. Over and over again.
There is a great deal of effort in this way of living. You may have to work hard, make difficult decisions, ask for help, or change what you’re doing. But your attention has something useful to rest on. There is work to be done today, and you can do it without first settling the question of where your whole life is going.
Like a man putting one foot in front of the other, you may not be aware of how much ground you’re covering. You’re occupied with the next step.
Can you feel the need for speed beginning to melt away? I hope so. Because the combination of these three things has already changed the question considerably. You have something to do, a reason to do it, and a growing sense of how you ought to do it. How fast you appear to be moving becomes less consuming.
But then you look up.
4. Keep His ways
Every now and then, you’ll look up and realise you’re still in prison while the other servant has been released. Or you’ll find yourself in the lions’ den after doing what you believed was right. A setback. An outcome that seems to contradict everything you thought you were learning.
And you may be tempted to conclude that the first three steps were wrong.
This is where keeping His ways becomes difficult. It is easy to say you trust God’s purposes when your circumstances appear to confirm them. It becomes harder when obedience seems to be costing you the very future you thought He was leading you towards.
Part of my understanding of the Christian life is that our commitment gets tested. I can’t pretend to understand all of it. And whenever I experience it, I am usually annoyed. It is much easier to appreciate a trial once you are some distance from it.
One way I have come to think about it is this: if I had a mission and entrusted people with a part in it, I would care whether they remained committed when that mission became inconvenient. I would want to know what they would do with the responsibility I gave them.
That thought brings me back to the belief we started with. God has purposes, and I have a part to play in them. Keeping His ways matters even when I cannot see how doing so will help me get anywhere.
Daniel refused to defile himself with the king’s food. Joseph refused Potiphar’s wife. Joseph’s refusal helped land him in prison. So obedience cannot simply be a clever strategy for avoiding trouble on the way to the palace. Sometimes it is what gets you into trouble.
And this is where I have to be careful with my own formula. I can surrender my ambition because I believe God will take me somewhere greater, then quietly begin treating obedience as the new method for getting there. I am still trying to secure the outcome. I have simply changed the method.
I don’t know what would have happened to Joseph or Daniel had they made different choices. But I can see that their faithfulness mattered before they knew what those choices would cost or where their lives would lead.
That is the part I am trying to learn. To keep His ways while I am still in the middle of the story, without requiring the ending as proof that I should.
If you attempt these four things, I think you begin to forget the original question of pace. Something else starts to occupy you. Service. To God, to His purposes, and to His people.
You still have decisions to make. You still have responsibilities, deadlines and days when you need to move quickly. But you spend less of your life trying to establish whether you are ahead or behind. You have a way of attending to the life you actually have.
It is a strange way to live. And it has taken me time to find my footing between surrender and the agency we have as humans. I am still learning. But I have found more ease here than I ever found trying to force my life into the shape I had decided it must take.
And most days, fast or slow, fat or lean, I find myself returning to the words of the hymn: whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, it is well with my soul.
PS. For Kodzo. Your questions was lot more specific. And beyond the overly theological answer, maybe the real answer is simple. After you've done your fleshly part, wait. Be present. Till you feel it's time to move. Then move.