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December 10, 2024
The good of being delivered from hurry is not simply pleasure but the ability to do calmly and effectively—with strength and joy—that which really matters.
We move into the city; I walk to work. I start therapy. One word: wow. Turns out, I need a lot of it. I focus on emotional health. Work fewer hours. Date my wife. Play Star Wars Legos with my kids. (It’s for them, really.) Practice Sabbath. Detox from Netflix. Start reading fiction for the first time since high school. Walk the dog before bed. You know, live.
honestly value who I’m becoming over where I end up.
“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry.
Hurry and love are incompatible.
Love, joy, and peace are the triumvirate at the heart of Jesus’s kingdom vision. All three are more than just emotions; they are overall conditions of the heart. They aren’t just pleasant feelings; they are the kinds of people we become through our apprenticeship to Jesus, who embodies all three ad infinitum.
The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.
To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.11
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.
The Sabbath—the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity—was…a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity.
Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.
Reject any guilt or shame you’re feeling right now. It’s not helpful, rarely from God,
Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity…name your value. Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.
The mystics point out that what’s missing is awareness. Meaning, in the chronic problem of human beings’ felt experience of distance from God, God isn’t usually the culprit. God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.
we’re the ones who are absent, not God? We sit around sucked into our phones or TV or to-do lists, oblivious to the God who is around us, with us, in us, even more desirous than we are for relationship.
Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.
One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.
All I’m saying is limitations aren’t all bad. They are where we find God’s will for our lives.
We have to learn to say no. Constantly.
This is the terrifying aspect of this conversation for me; most of us waste copious amounts of time. Myself included. For all the talk about hurry and overload, most of it is self-inflicted.
In an hour of TV before bed, we could read through the entire Bible. In six months. In a day running errands and shopping for crap we really don’t need, we could practice Sabbath—an entire seventh of our lives devoted to rest, worship, and the celebration of our journey through God’s good world.
Every day is a chance. Every hour an opportunity. Every moment a precious gift.
Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
Salvation is healing.
Okay, let’s read it one more time. Even slower. Breathe deeply; don’t rush this part; God has something for you in this moment: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened… And I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… For I am gentle and humble in heart… And you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy… And my burden is light.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
the Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle.
Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount [his yoke] will develop in us a balance and a “way” of carrying life that will give more rest than the way we have been living.
That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At his side. Like two oxen in a field, tied shoulder to shoulder. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At his pace. Slow, unhurried, present to the moment, full of love and joy and peace. An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.9
We could go on, but my point is simple: he put on display an unhurried life, where space for God and love for people were the top priorities, and because he said yes to the Father and his kingdom, he constantly said no to countless other invitations.
Again: What does it mean to follow Jesus (or, as I prefer, apprentice under Jesus)? It’s very simple. It means you live the way Jesus lived. You take his life and teachings as your template, your model, your pattern.
a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God, to work and rest and play and eat and drink and hang out with your friends and run errands and catch up on the news, all out of a place of deep, loving enjoyment of the Father’s company.
Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,”7 not the kingdom of entertainment.
The end is life to the full with Jesus. The end is to spend every waking moment in the conscious enjoyment of Jesus’ company, to spend our entire lives with the most loving, joyful, peaceful person to ever live.
you are also opening yourself up to a power far beyond your own—that of the Holy Spirit. You are creating time and space to access God himself at the deepest level of your being.
The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself.4
But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
