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June 10 - June 12, 2024
I’m tearing through each day, so busy with life that I’m missing out on the moment. And what is life but a series of moments?
My dream is to slow down, simplify my life around abiding. Walk to work. I want to reset the metrics for success, I say. I want to focus more on who I am becoming in apprenticeship to Jesus.
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.
good Kenyan from Heart on Twelfth)
Hurry is the root problem underneath so many of the symptoms of toxicity in our world.
Corrie ten Boom once said that if 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.
Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.
“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
if there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.
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.14
Life was “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity,”
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.27
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.
attention leads to awareness.
Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.
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. That bodes well for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in his world.
the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.
intelligence is not the same as wisdom.
And how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).
Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
Following Jesus has to make it onto your schedule and into your practices or it will simply never happen. Apprenticeship to Jesus will remain an idea, not a reality in your life.
We get out what we put in.
A millennium and a half ago, the African theologian Saint Augustine said entering silence is “entering into joy.”16
Quiet is a kind of balm for emotional healing. And more: an unlocked, open door to spiritual life.
As easy as it is to blame the devil, could it be that we’re using external noise to drown out internal noise?
silence and solitude are the most important of all the spiritual disciplines.
Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life…. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.21
if you don’t set aside time to be alone with God, your relationship will wither on the vine.
human desire is infinite because we were made to live with God forever in his world and nothing less will ever satisfy us, so our only hope is to put desire back in its proper place on God. And to put all our other desires in their proper place below God. Not to detach from all desire (as in Stoicism or Buddhism), but to come to the place where we no longer need _______ to live a happy, restful life.
“The Sabbath was made for man.” It was created, designed, by God himself. And it’s “for” us. A gift to enjoy from the Creator to the creation. To gratefully receive.
He set aside an entire day just to delight in his world.
My family and I do this every week. Just before sunset on Friday, we finish up all our to-do lists and homework and grocery shopping and responsibilities, power down all our devices (we literally put them all in a box and stow it in a closet), and gather around the table as a family. We open a bottle of wine, light some candles, read a psalm, pray. Then we feast, and we basically don’t stop feasting for the next twenty-four hours. It’s the Comer way! And, I might add, the Jesus way. We sleep in Saturday morning. Drink coffee. Read our Bibles. Pray more. Spend time together. Talk. Laugh. In
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morning, hearing the news. On West Coast time it was pretty early, and
Contentment isn’t some Buddhist-like negation of all desire; it’s living in such a way that your unfulfilled desires no longer curb your happiness. We all live with unfulfilled desires. In this life all our symphonies remain unfinished. But this doesn’t mean we can’t live happy.
Right now you have everything you need to live a happy, content life; you have access to the Father. To his loving attention.
Our minds are the portals to our whole persons, so how we think has all sorts of ramifications for how we experience life with God.
9. Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in. T’s and my phones “go to bed” at the same time as our kids: 8:30 p.m., sharp. We literally set them to airplane mode and put them in a drawer in the kitchen. Otherwise we burn time and end up frying our brains with blue screens rather than winding down for bed with a good book or, you know, couples stuff.
let prayer set your emotional equilibrium and Scripture set your view of the world. Begin your day in the spirit of God’s presence and the truth of his Scriptures.
at the beginning of each day, put your phone on the other side of your house and don’t look at it until after you’ve spent time in devotion to God.
what we give our attention to is the person we become, for good or evil.
Every…single…thing that we let into our minds will have an effect on our souls.
Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts.
happiness levels peak on day eight of vacation and then hit a plateau.19 The researchers recommended we take off one week every quarter (for those with the luxury of four weeks paid vacation time).
Fast food is fast, not food. Real food takes time. We’re okay with that.
That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with [Jesus] forever in the next.1
All the best stuff is in the present, the now.
if there’s a formula for a happy life, it’s quite simple – inhabit the moment.
Each moment is full of goodness. Why are we in such a hurry to rush on to the next one? There’s so much here to see, to enjoy, to gratefully receive, to celebrate, to share.
