The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

by John Mark Comer

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.

Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

As far back as approximately 200 BC,1 people were complaining about what this “new” technology was doing to society. The Roman playwright Plautus turned anger into poetry: The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions!

You went to bed with the moon and got up with the sun. Days were long and busy in summer, short and slow in winter.

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.

All I’m saying is limitations aren’t all bad. They are where we find God’s will for our lives.

Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle. By life I mean your experience of the human condition, and by lifestyle I mean the rhythms and routines that make up your day-to-day existence. The way you organize your time. Spend your money.

If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and growth, it will wither away.

But Jesus never commands you to wake up in the morning and have a quiet time, read your Bible, live in community, practice Sabbath, give your money to the poor, or any of the core practices from his way. He just does these practices and then says, “Follow me.”