It’s the sheer speed of things. Technology. Progress. Breakthroughs. Change. Life.

Less than 24 hours following the 2012 Oscars, Angelina Jolie’s leg had 7k followers on Twitter. It’s close to 50k now, in case you’re curious. If you don’t know the story behind the leg, a quick Google search will get you caught up.

Whitney Houston’s tragic death was reported by a Twitter user more than half an hour before any official news media outlet.

Technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented clip. The Internet is a great example of this phenomenon. Remember when you had to wait for the morning paper? Or the nightly news? Or even the online news alert? Now news, even trends, come and go overnight.

It’s like that with life in general. Our food is fast. Our entertainment is on demand. The answer to all questions is a wiki away. You can buy/sell/trade anything at anytime from anywhere. From Fandango to FastPass we are on the verge of eliminating the need to ever wait in another line. Making a friend is as easy as sending a request. Literally everything in our life now is geared to feeding our innate human desire for instant gratification.

For me, this makes it tremendously challenging to exercise patience in my walk with God. With everything else in my life being fast-tracked and the space between want and have being all but erased, it sometimes feels like my faith walk is moving at the speed of paint drying.

It’s so hard with everything else being at my fingertips to remember that there is no app for quickly delivering a deep enriching relationship with God. No social network that will put me in instant community with Him. No status update that will provide me total insight into God’s will in 140 characters.

It can feel frustrating and disenchanting when the pursuit takes longer than I’d like. But I have to resist that feeling and recognize that the society around me is wired for rapid movement, resolution in a nanosecond, gratification in an instant. And not the reality of sitting still with God and deeply uncovering what He has for me.