I wasn't some dilettante.

The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.

Joel Henderson was once asked how he had managed to write all those books. He replied that he had never written a book. All he did was write one page a day. With his limited energy and restricted imagination, a page at a time was all that he could manage. But when a year was up he had a 365-page book.

Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.

That's when the phrase (from Nietzsche) "a long obedience in the same direction" embedded itself in my imagination and eventually became this book.

Christian faith needs continuous maintenance. It requires attending to. "If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.

Genuine apocalyptic that has no parentage in biblical sources or gospel commitments, does promote a progeny of irresponsibility (and the brats are noisily and distressingly in evidence on every American street), but the real thing, the conceived-in-holy-wedlock apocalyptic, develops communities that are passionately patient, courageously committed to witness and work in the kingdom of God no matter how long it takes, or how much it costs.

What Berry sees in his farm as a form, I see in Scripture as a form. Think of the farm as an organic whole, but with boundaries so that you are aware and stay in touch with all the interrelations: the house and barn, the horses and the chickens, the weather of sun and rain, the food prepared in the house and the work done in the fields, the machinery and the tools, the seasons. There are steady, relaxed rhythms in place.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of our great modern Isaian prophets who had extensive experience with violence in two world wars, wrote, "The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships."

Perseverance does not mean "perfection." It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us.