On keeping
Two songs called 'Slow Down'
On August 18, at BYU Education Week, Elder Patrick Kearon of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles stood in front of a few thousand people who had spent vacation days on continuing education, and told them, kindly, that he knew exactly who they were: “chronic overachievers — and you know who you are.” Then he gave a devotional called Peace and Rest—Even Now that I haven’t stopped thinking about all week.
The heart of it is a story about a message. In an earlier calling, Elder Kearon reported to President M. Russell Ballard, and after one particularly heavy meeting a message arrived from him. No script, no instructions. Just a link to a video: the Norwegian soprano Sissel, with the Tabernacle Choir, singing a song called “Slow Down.” A senior apostle, one of the most driven men on earth, ministering to a colleague with four minutes of music that say, in essence: be still. You are not God. He is.
Elder Kearon played the recording right there in the devotional, and when it ended he repeated its refrain back to the audience almost as a benediction: please, please slow down. Be still and wait for the Spirit of the Lord.
The song he played: fifty years of “Slow Down”
That song has been slowing people down for fifty years. Chuck Girard wrote it in 1974 — one of the fathers of the Jesus-music movement, whose whole songbook grew out of a storefront revival of young people nobody else wanted in their pews. It’s a musical setting of Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God,” and Girard said it drew more letters than anything else he ever wrote. He even noticed that the long, held note on the word “Slow…” — the one that makes impatient listeners squirm — seemed to minister to them precisely by making them wait. He died last year, at eighty-one. The song is still doing its work without him, which tells you something about what a faithful record can do after the voice that made it is gone.
When Sissel sang it at the 2019 Pioneer Day concerts, nearly twenty thousand people in the Conference Center went completely silent when she finished — and then rose in a standing ovation, both nights. Sissel herself laughed at the irony: a song telling everyone to slow down had brought them all to their feet.
The other one
Here is where I have a confession. I wrote a song called “Slow Down” too — track three on She Was Always Meant to Fly — and it is not a setting of Psalm 46.
It’s a mother in a doorway, watching a child grow up at a speed no one warned her about. “I swear I blinked and you were walking.” And where Girard’s song delivers a command that can be obeyed, mine hits the wall every parent knows: “’Cause I can’t make time slow down.”
I’m not the first parent to reach for that title, either — Nichole Nordeman wrote her own beloved “Slow Down” the night before her son’s fifth-grade graduation, and millions of mothers have cried through it since. She explained why better than I ever could: there is no more whispered phrase from a mother of any age, about her child of any age, than it’s going by too fast.
For a while I thought all these songs just happened to share a title. I don’t think that anymore. Listen to who is speaking in each one. In Girard’s song, the voice saying slow down belongs to God: “Slow down, slow down, be still, my child.” In the parents’ songs the voice comes from the other end — Nordeman says it to her child, and I say it to time itself, and time doesn’t listen. They are the same conversation heard from its two ends. Heaven’s Parent, who could stop every clock in the universe, chooses instead to say be still to His hurried child. And an earthly parent, who can’t stop anything, has to learn that same stillness while her own child hurries toward the door.
Elder Kearon stood exactly at the middle of that conversation. He received the message as the hurried child. He gave the devotional as the grandfather — and the tenderest moment in it is about his granddaughter, who found a feather that had drifted off a cushion and spent fifteen delighted minutes blowing it back into the air. Nothing was achieved. It was one of the best things anyone in the family had seen all year. And then he said something that undid me: with the help of AI, they’ve since recreated the moment — “I have some other moments I’d like to recreate too.”
An apostle, mid-sermon on stillness, wishing out loud that he had kept more of what happened.
What stillness and keeping have to do with each other
You could hear those as two different sermons — be still and write it down — and I used to worry they pulled in opposite directions. They don’t, and there’s actual science under why.
Psychologists call it the holiday paradox: in hindsight, we don’t measure time in minutes, we measure it in memories. A week of new experiences feels enormous when you look back on it; a routine month vanishes. Childhood summers felt endless because everything in them was a first. Which means the clock has never been the real problem. Nobody can slow time down — but attention makes it thick, and a kept moment goes on existing in a way an unnoticed one never does. Elder Kearon ended his devotional with Wordsworth’s daffodils for exactly this reason: the poet “gazed and gazed,” and the wealth of that moment paid out years later, on a couch, when it flashed on the inward eye. The stillness is how you receive a moment. The record is how it can find you again.
That’s the resolution my song was reaching for all along. The mother in it never does slow time down. She stops fighting it and starts keeping it — “So I’m writing down the little things, the way you laughed this morning… I’m taking all the pictures, I’m recording all the sounds” — not as one more item on the to-do list, but as the opposite of hustle: sitting still long enough to actually see the person in front of her. The song ends where Elder Kearon’s Gaudí story ends — the architect who left his cathedral unfinished on purpose, because my client is in no hurry. Hers goes: “You were never meant to stay… and time was the plan.”
His whole message to the overachievers was that peace is not waiting on the far side of the finished list — “If I have a wish for you, it is that you will find peace in your actual life.” Cheerfully do what is in your power, he said, and then stand still. I’d only add the small thing my song adds: while you’re standing still, tonight, you could keep one little thing. The laugh from this morning. Forty seconds of a voice. UNA is a quiet place to put it, but a phone on the table and a voicemail you refuse to delete honor it just as well. We have always been a people who write things down — not because we can slow anything, but because keeping is what love does about time.
Two songs, one title, fifty years apart. His ends “and know that He is God.” Mine ends “and time was the plan.” I’ve come to believe those are the same sentence.
Listen and read: “Slow Down” (UNA Band) is on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. Elder Kearon’s devotional Peace and Rest—Even Now is on BYU Speeches in audio and video.
UNA is an independent project — made by one member, for members — and is not built, reviewed, or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Quotes are from public teachings, shared with reverence; they are not endorsements.