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

by John Mark Comer

in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.

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.

“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 for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day.

Hurry and love are oil and water: they simply do not mix.

“I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”

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.