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October 21 - November 6, 2025
And we are so used to spiritually mediocre days—days lived in irritation and fear and self-preoccupation and frenzy—that we throw our lives away in a hurry.
Another day of meetings. I freaking hate meetings. I’m introverted and creative, and like most millennials I get bored way too easily. Me in a lot of meetings is a terrible idea for all involved.
Change is slow, gradual, and intermittent; three steps forward, a step or two back. Some days I nail it; others, I slip back into hurry.
What if all you had to do was slow down long enough for the merry-go-round blur of life to come into focus?
Most of us don’t even think to look to Jesus for advice on how to be happy.
“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. That kind of busy is what has us all reeling.
But in the upside-down kingdom, our value system is turned on its head: hurry is of the devil; slow is of Jesus, because Jesus is what love looks like in flesh and blood.
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.
“I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.” Nobody can.
It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.12
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.
Do you see what’s at stake here? It’s not just our emotional health that’s under threat. As if that’s not enough. We move so fast through life that we’re stressed out, on edge, quick to snap at our spouses or kids. Sure, that’s true. But it’s even more terrifying: our spiritual lives hang in the balance.
I can’t help but wonder if Jesus would say to our entire generation what he said to Martha: “You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”
Microsoft researcher Linda Stone said “continuous partial attention” is our new normal.
The problem is, even if we realize and admit that we have a digital addiction—it’s an addiction. Our willpower doesn’t stand a chance against the Like button.
As Tony Schwartz said in his opinion piece for the New York Times: 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 relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it. It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment.
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.
