The Pace of the One You Walk With

Walking with somebody is not the same as going to the same place as somebody.

That sounds obvious said out loud and it is not obvious at all in practice, and the difference is entirely a matter of speed.

Think about the last time you walked anywhere with another person. There is a constant small negotiation going on the whole way, and neither of you ever mentions it. One of you lengthens a stride. One of you shortens one. Somebody slows at a corner. It is happening continuously and nobody talks about it, and if it works, both people arrive together having had a conversation.

And if it does not work, one person walks in front and the other one follows, and they still arrive at the same place, and they did not walk together at all.

Now hold that beside a phrase you have heard your whole life.

Walking with God.

If you are like most people, you have read that as a description of direction. Same destination. Same road. Agreeing with Him about where the whole thing is going, which you do, and which is not nothing.

I want to suggest that it is also a phrase about pace, and that a person can be on exactly the right road, going to exactly the right place, and be forty yards out in front the entire way.

Two words, and one of them is with

There is a man in Genesis whose whole life is recorded in about eleven words, and the sentence has been sitting there for a very long time.

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him. (Genesis 5:24, King James Version)

That is the entire account of a man's life.

Not what he built. Not what he said. Not a single thing he accomplished. Walked with God, and then God took him.

Stay on the preposition, because everything is in it. Not walked toward God, which would be about direction. Not walked for God, which would be about work. With.

And with is a word about proximity, which means it is a word about speed. Two people cannot be with each other at different velocities. That is not a metaphor and it is not a spiritual subtlety, it is simply what the word means. You are with somebody when you are level with them.

You are being described by a preposition rather than by a distance covered, and being level has never once been the same as being slow. Genesis 5:24 records a life as walking with God rather than as work done for Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a small word carry the weight it was always carrying.

Out in front is not disobedience

Now I want to say what being out in front actually is, because it is very easily heard as rebellion and it is almost never that.

A person gets out in front by being willing. That is the whole of it. Something needs doing and they can see it and they go, and they go now, because waiting feels like negligence when a thing is obvious.

Out in front is not the posture of somebody who does not care what God wants. It is the posture of somebody who is very sure they already know, and who is probably right about the direction, and who has stopped checking because checking slows a person down.

And it is lonely in a specific way that people in this condition rarely name. You can be doing the right work, on the right road, and be conducting the whole thing as a report rather than a conversation. Telling Him what has been done rather than asking anything. That is what being ahead sounds like from the inside.

You are on the road He put you on, and the direction has never once been the thing that went wrong here. Genesis 5:24 commends a manner of walking rather than a change of route. The Spirit of God is the one who can correct a pace without ever questioning the willingness underneath it.

I want to be plain about the encouraging half. The willingness is not a flaw. There are a great many people who never move at all, and this article is not for them, and the world runs on people who go when they see a thing.

You are the kind of person who moves, and that has never once needed apologizing for. The written word never rebukes readiness anywhere it appears, and His Spirit is entirely able to keep somebody's willingness and change only where they are standing while they use it.

Being level will feel like stopping

Now the honest warning, because this is the part that catches people and it caught me.

If a person has been forty yards ahead for years, level does not feel like level. It feels like being held back. It feels like something has gone wrong, or like a season has ended, or like being sidelined.

That reaction is not information about God's pace. It is information about your own, and about how long it has been since the two were compared.

Which is why this cannot be worked out by feel. It has to be practiced with a body, in an actual situation, at an actual speed, because the feeling will lie about it for at least the first few times.

So here is the practice, and it is deliberately physical.

Walk with somebody, and let them set the pace.

An actual walk, with an actual person, on an actual path. Do not lead. Do not drift ahead and wait, which is the sophisticated version of leading. Stay level, the whole way, and let the small negotiation come out in their favor every time.

You are able to stay level with somebody for one walk, and the feeling of being held back has never once been evidence about anything. Genesis 5:24 puts a whole life under the word with rather than under a distance. The same Spirit who preserved that sentence is well able to steady somebody through twenty minutes of feeling slow.