The Elephant of Pace
The Elephant of Pace
Pastor Torry Sheppard | The Elephant in the Family Room – Week 1
Naming the Elephant
In the opening week of The Elephant in the Family Room, Pastor Torry introduced the central idea of the series: many families live with problems that are obvious, impactful, and exhausting—yet rarely acknowledged. Like an elephant in the living room, these issues are too big to ignore, but over time they become normal. We step around them, adjust our lives to accommodate them, and learn to live with them. But ignoring elephants doesn’t make them disappear—it only makes them more comfortable. And if left unaddressed, they quietly shrink our vision of the life and family God intends.
With that framework in place, Pastor Torry named the first and perhaps most common elephant of all—one our culture celebrates, rewards, and even spiritualizes: the elephant of pace.
A Life That Feels Full—Yet Empty
To bring the issue into focus, Pastor Torry described a day that feels familiar to many: alarms and snoozes, phones and notifications, rushed mornings, missing shoes, packed calendars, drop-offs, meetings, practices, late dinners, and exhausted evenings. Everything functions. Nothing is obviously wrong. By cultural standards, it’s a good life—productive, responsible, respectable.
And yet, something feels off.
The problem isn’t that this life is immoral. It’s that it’s unsustainable. It feels full, but strangely empty. Life moves fast, but joy is elusive. As Job once put it, “My days are swifter than a runner; they fly away without a glimpse of joy.” Many of us feel that tension—running constantly, rarely landing.
The Lies Driving Our Hurry
Pastor Torry identified two lies that quietly fuel our pace problem.
The first is the belief that we can have it all—strong faith, thriving careers, healthy marriages, present parenting, deep friendships, financial security, rest, and peace—all at the same time, at full speed. And if we don’t, we feel like we’re failing.
The second lie is that things will change when… When the project ends. When life slows down. When the next promotion comes. When we finally arrive. But that moment never really comes—not because we lack discipline, but because opportunity always multiplies, and human desire is never satisfied by “enough.”
Even technology, which promised to free us, has only accelerated us. Opportunity rarely produces margin; it often becomes a tyrant. And when we’re addicted to more, we become enslaved to hurry.
Why Hurry Is So Dangerous
Hurry, Pastor Torry explained, isn’t just about having a full calendar. It’s about the pace at which we live. It’s meals rushed, conversations cut short, prayer postponed, Scripture squeezed out, and the people we love receiving the tired version of us.
What makes hurry especially dangerous is that it disguises itself as faithfulness. Those most vulnerable to it are often the most responsible—capable, dependable, admired. You can look successful on the outside while slowly becoming thin on the inside.
Hurry doesn’t just affect our schedules. It affects our souls.
Spiritually, busyness becomes one of the greatest enemies of discipleship—not because Jesus opposes work, but because the pace of the world is incompatible with following Him. Jesus was never hurried, yet never lazy. He moved with urgency, not anxiety. He was interruptible. He noticed people. And His invitation has always been simple and demanding: “Follow me.” That invitation assumes our pace matters.
The Cost to Our Families
Living beyond our limits carries a cost that often shows up slowly. Marriages drift before they break. Parenting becomes logistical rather than formational. Homes become functional, but not deeply formative. Faith becomes reactive instead of rooted—practiced mainly in crisis rather than cultivated over time.
The danger isn’t that we stop believing—it’s that we stop becoming.
Redeeming Time, Not Managing It
The hope Pastor Torry offered wasn’t a better productivity system. God’s answer to hurry isn’t efficiency—it’s redemption. Paul’s words in Ephesians 5 reframed the issue: “Be very careful… redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” To redeem time means it has been distorted, and God doesn’t simply want to help us manage it—He wants to restore it.
That restoration begins by exchanging lies for truth. Instead of “I can have it all,” we embrace wisdom and limits: “Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.” Instead of waiting for the perfect moment to follow Jesus, we recognize the time is now.
Choosing a Different Rhythm
Pastor Torry closed by introducing anchor points—intentional, sometimes inconvenient rhythms that slow us down and create margin. These might look like hard stops to the workday, boundaries around technology, protected family meals, Sabbath practices, or rules of presence that guard what matters most.
He shared a personal example—mowing his own lawn—as a simple but revealing baseline. If he can’t find time for that, he’s too busy. Not everyone needs a lawn. But everyone needs anchors.
Because the closing truth remains clear: you can’t build the family God designed at the speed culture demands—but you can choose a different rhythm on purpose.