We Have Been Getting Ready for You
The Compass | Saturday, May 2
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They are coming.
Some of them are tired in ways that don’t show up on a doctor’s chart. Some have been carrying the weight of other people’s lives for so long they’ve forgotten what their own feels like. Some are hoping — quietly, carefully, the way you hope when you’ve been disappointed before — that something here might reach them.
They are coming to Stillpoint.
And we are ready. Not in the way that requires perfection, but in the way that requires presence. The beds are made. The kettle is waiting. The mountains outside the window are doing what mountains do, which is simply to be enormous and unhurried and indifferent to our schedules in the most healing way imaginable.
But the readiness that matters most is not the one we finished.
It began on a road in Spain.
Ten years ago, three words were gifted to us on The Camino. Not in a vision, not with drama. Just the way truth sometimes comes: quietly, with the force of truth: Pace, not race. That was all. But it was everything.
We were not yet who we needed to become to receive those words fully. We received them anyway, and they began their slow, patient work on us. They rewrote the rhythm of our days. They exposed the anxious engine underneath our activity. They taught us something we now can only describe as rest — not the rest of stopping, but the rest of arriving, of ceasing to flee the present moment in pursuit of the next one.
That gift was never meant to stop with us.
We have been building toward this slowly, as all real things are built. Not rushing it into existence, which would have been its own irony. The land, the cottage, the garden, the flowerbeds, the firepit, the contemplative architecture of a place where pace, not race is not a slogan but a practice. All of it has been years in the making.
And just this week, Lorri and I sat with the hosts of our own Oasis Rest retreat, pastoral servants who get it and have been doing this sacred, unglamorous work of caring for depleted pastors and missionaries and they spoke peace into us. They spoke goodness. They reminded us why the work matters and, more than that, they reminded us that we are not alone in it.
We came home with full hearts.
So when I say we are ready to receive our guests, I mean something particular. I mean that we are not operating from the anxiety of wanting to do this well. We are operating from the overflow of what we have been given.
Some of our guests want to learn the practices of spiritual direction. Some want, above everything else, simply to sleep and breathe and stop performing. Some are hoping to heal from wounds they haven’t fully named yet. We will not try to fix any of them. We will try to make a space quiet enough that they can hear what they already know, and still enough that the One who has been pursuing them can be noticed.
That is the whole of it.
Pace, not race.
We have been getting ready for you for a long time.
Gene Maynard is the founder of The Compass Institute for Christian Spirituality and Director of Stillpoint, a retreat space near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. Learn more about The Stillpoint and Oasis Rest retreats at oasisrest.org.