More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 25 - September 4, 2025
Why am I in such a rush to become somebody I don’t even like?
“They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”5
“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.
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.”
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.
“God did not create 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
There’s a reason people talk about “walking” with God, not “running” with God. It’s because God is 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.9
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.”
Not only does hurry keep us from the love, joy, and peace of the kingdom of God—the very core of what all human beings crave—but it also keeps us from God himself simply by stealing our attention. And with hurry, we always lose more than we gain.
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.
Lately I’ve taken to reading poetry, which is new for me. But I love how it forces me to slow down. You simply can’t speed-read a good poem.
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
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.
We lost more than a day of rest; we lost a day for our souls to open up to God.
A similar study found that just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off) “will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.” Translation: they make us dumber. As one summary of the report put it, “If you grow dependent on your smartphone, it becomes a magical device that silently shouts your name at your brain at all times.”17
In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds. To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.20 Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.
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. It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm.
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.
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.
But again: we become what we give our attention to, for better or worse.
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”15
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. One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.
Listen, I have good news for you. Great news, in fact. You. Can’t. Do. It. All. And neither can I. We’re human. Time, space, one place at a time, all that pesky non-omnipresent stuff. We have limitations. Lots of them.
“We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”10
And how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).
Every day is a chance. Every hour an opportunity. Every moment a precious gift.
Salvation is healing. Even the etymology of our English word salvation comes from the Latin salve. As in, an ointment you put on a burn or a wound.
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.4
Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke—to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease. To step out of the burnout society to a life of soul rest.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
The reality is, I want the life, but I’m not willing to adopt the lifestyle behind it. I think that’s how a lot of us feel about Jesus.
But in Jesus’ case it is worth the cost. In fact, you get back far more than you give up. There’s a cross, yes, a death, but it’s followed by an empty tomb, a new portal to life. Because in the way of Jesus, death is always followed by resurrection.
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.
Just take his life as a template for your own. Take on his habits and practices. As an apprentice, copy your Rabbi’s every move. After all, that’s the whole point of apprenticeship.
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.
He would practice Sabbath on a weekly basis—an entire day set aside for nothing but rest and worship, every single week.
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.
How would Jesus live if he were me?
I think, for many of us, he would slow way down.
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.
Are you ready to arrange (or rearrange) your days so that Jesus’ life becomes your new normal?
this new normal of hurried digital distraction is robbing us of the ability to be present. Present to God. Present to other people. Present to all that is good, beautiful, and true in our world. Even present to our own souls.
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.2
