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April 23 - May 12, 2025
So, in these pages lies the Great Invitation. Take a deep breath. Put your cell phone away. Let your heart slow down. Let God take care of the world.
“They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”5
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.
“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
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.
“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
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. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day. I ooze anger, tension, a critical nagging—the antitheses of love.
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.
To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.
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.
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.
“You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”15 The need of the hour is for a slowdown spirituality.
But the clock changed all that: it created artificial time—the slog of the nine-to-five all year long. We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our alarms droned their oppressive siren—not when our bodies were done resting. We became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being.
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.
Then in 1879 you had Edison and the light bulb, which made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay, brace yourself for this next stat: before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night.6 Yes: eleven. I used to read biographies of great men and women from history who got up to pray at four o’clock in the morning—Saint Teresa of Ávila, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon. I would think, Wow, they are way more serious about Jesus than I am. True, but then I realized that they went to bed at seven o’clock! After nine hours of sleep, what else was there to do?
A century ago the less you worked, the more status you had. Now it’s flipped: the more you sit around and relax, the less status you have.
Before any of this started, way back in 1936, another literary prophet, Aldous Huxley, wrote of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”26 In his prescient novel Brave New World, he envisioned a future dystopia not of dictatorship but of distraction, where sex, entertainment, and busyness tear apart the fabric of society.
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 Everyone.
The point I’m driving toward is this: an overbusy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it’s toxic. Psychologists tell us anxiety is often the canary in the coal mine, our souls’ way of telling us something is deeply wrong and we need to fix
A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to
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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.
“Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”
There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.
We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers. Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite. Image and dust. Potential and limitations.
Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.
Every day is a chance. Every hour an opportunity. Every moment a precious gift.
To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. 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.
The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus. And in doing so to recover your soul. To have the warped part of you put back into shape. To experience healing in the deepest parts of your being. To experience what Jesus called “life…to the full.”1 What the New Testament writers call “salvation.”
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.
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
Here’s a conviction of mine: 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.
A rule was a schedule and set of practices to order your life around the way of Jesus in community. It was a way to keep from getting sucked into the hurry, busyness, noise, and distraction of regular life. A way to slow down. A way to live into what really matters: what Jesus called abiding.6 Key relationships with family and community. The work God has set before us. A healthy soul. You know, the good stuff.
for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
He didn’t command us to follow his practices; neither did he give lectures on how to do them or offer Saturday morning workshops on developing your own rule of life. He simply set the example of a whole new way to “carry life”; then he turned around and said, “If you’re tired of the way you’ve been doing it and want rest for your souls, then come, take up the easy yoke, and copy the details of my life.”
There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.
“The friend of silence draws near to God.”
Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former. And solitude—as somber as it sounds—is anything but loneliness.
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.
What would satisfy our desire? What would it take to feel satisfied? The answer he came up with was this: everything. We would have to experience everything and everybody and be experienced by everything and everybody to feel satisfied. Eat at every restaurant; travel to every country, every city, every exotic locale; experience every natural wonder; make love to every partner we could possibly desire; win every award; climb to the top of every field; own every item in the world; etc. We would have to experience it all to ever feel…okay,
In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.
[The Sabbath] has largely been forgotten by the church, which has uncritically mimicked the rhythms of the industrial and success-obsessed West. The result? Our road-weary, exhausted churches have largely failed to integrate Sabbath into their lives as vital elements of Christian discipleship. It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore.
I’ve had people laugh off the call to Sabbath with a terrible cliché: “Yeah, well, the devil never takes a day off.” Ummm, last time I checked, the devil loses. Plus, he’s the devil.
down. It’s been proven by study after study: there is zero correlation between hurry and productivity. In fact, once you work a certain number of hours in a week, your productivity plummets. Wanna know what the number is? Fifty hours. Ironic: that’s about a six-day workweek. One study found that there was zero difference in productivity between workers who logged seventy hours and those who logged fifty-five.15 Could God be speaking to us even through our bodies?
Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter the Sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week.
The Sabbath is like that: a holiday every week, but without all the stress and family drama. A once-a-week celebration of all that is good in God’s world.
That’s why under the Torah all buying and selling was off-limits for the Sabbath. This wasn’t a legalistic rule from the Old Covenant that we’re now “free” from. It was a life-giving practice from the way to break our addiction to the West’s twin gods: accomplishment and accumulation.
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.
Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?…Seek first [God’s] kingdom.
