The Pace of the Flock

The setting matters. Jacob has just wrestled with God at the ford of the Jabbok, his hip is out of joint, and at daybreak he must face the brother he has not seen in twenty years. Esau says, "Let's take our journey, and let's go, and I will go before you" (Gen 33:12) — which sounds like goodwill; let's travel together. But Jacob does the arithmetic: the children are tender, the flocks and herds have their young, and "if they overdrive them one day, all the flocks will die."

Notice the measure: **one day.** Not a year of hard driving. One. Esau's pace is a normal pace for Esau, and a lethal pace for these lambs. So Jacob proposes another way of traveling: "I will lead on gently, according to the pace of the livestock that are before me." A man whose own hip God has just touched, who is himself walking with a limp, states the first law of leading people — **the speed of the company is set by its weakest member, not by its strongest.**

Isaiah 40 first says that God "will come as a mighty one, and his arm will rule for him" (40:10), and the very next line uses that same arm to "gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom. He will gently lead those who have their young." *Gently lead* is the speed the Almighty chooses. God's power is not shown in how fast he can travel. It is shown in how slowly he is willing to go — slow enough for a nursing lamb to keep up.

So when you find yourself impatient that someone "still isn't growing," read that verse first. The person you are walking with is at this moment being shepherded by someone with far more patience than you.

The most common failure in leading people is not leading them the wrong way. It is **demanding that someone cover in ten weeks a road that took you ten years.** Everything you now find self-evident — the habit of morning prayer, finding a book without the table of contents, praying out loud in front of others — was ground out over a decade, and you have long forgotten how long the grinding took. Hebrews says it bluntly: new believers "have come to need milk, and not solid food" (Heb 5:12), and Paul told the Corinthians, "I fed you with milk, not with meat" (1 Cor 3:2). Pushing solid food at someone who needs milk is not cultivation. It is choking him.

Three slowing-down moves, very plain, very effective. **One: ask before you assign.** "Can you manage this much this week?" If he says it is hard, cut it in half. **Two: one assignment at a time.** One lesson, one action; the next comes after that one is done. Give three and you have given none. **Three: change the unit of your inner deadline from weeks to years.** Lesson 60 covered reading the seasons: bearing no fruit in winter is not laziness, it is winter. The question that actually matters is not "why is he so slow" but — **is this agitation the Holy Spirit's, or my timetable's?** It is usually the latter.