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November 11 - November 19, 2020
“Hurry,” he wrote, “involves excessive haste or a state of urgency. It is associated with words such as hurl, hurdle, hurly-burly (meaning “uproar”), and hurricane.” He defined it as a “state of frantic effort one falls into in response to inadequacy, fear, and guilt.” The simple essence of hurry is too much to do! The good of being delivered from hurry is not simply pleasure but the ability to do calmly and effectively—with strength and joy—that which really matters.
I want to reset the metrics for success,
he was the happiest person alive. Most of us don’t even think to look to Jesus for advice on how to be happy.
So he calls up Willard and asks, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?”4 There’s a long silence on the other end of the line… According to John, “With Willard there’s always a long silence on the other end of the line.” Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Willard: “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.
This new speed of life isn’t Christian; it’s anti-Christ.
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
Hence, in the apostle Paul’s definition of love, the first descriptor is “patient.”8 There’s a reason people talk about “walking” with God, not “running” with God. It’s because God is love.
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.”
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.11
We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.
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
“You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”15
You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
after millennia of slow, gradual acceleration, in recent decades the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch.
Not because time wasted on TV is the great Satan but because we rarely get done binge-watching anything (or posting to social media, or overeating Five Guys burgers and fries, etc.) and feel awake and alive from the soul outward, rested, refreshed, and ready for a new day. We delay the inevitable: an emotional crash. And as a consequence, we miss out on the life-giving sense of the with-ness of God.
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 it, fast.
Because attention leads to awareness. All the contemplatives agree. The mystics point out that what’s missing is awareness.
God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.
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.”
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.
I hate to admit it, but some people have a lot more capacity than I do. They can relate to more people, carry more responsibility, handle more stress, work more hours, lead more people, and so on, than I could ever dream of. Even the best version of me can’t do it all.
What if these limitations aren’t something to fight but to gratefully accept as a signpost to God’s call on our souls? I love Peter Scazzero’s line: “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”
After all, we were created to rule over the earth; nothing brings me more joy than to see men and women take their rightful place as loving, wise, creative, powerful rulers in society.
And how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).
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.
Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
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.
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.
But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities….
This rootedness in the moment and connectedness to God, other people, and himself weren’t the by-products of a laid-back personality or pre–Wi-Fi world; they were the outgrowths of a way of life.
Here’s the weird thing: very few followers of Jesus read the four Gospels that way. We read them as cute sermon illustrations or allegorical pick-me-ups or theological gold mines. Again, not bad, but we often miss the proverbial forest for the trees. They are biographies.
When the spiritual disciplines (Bible reading, prayer, Sabbath, and so on) become an end in and of themselves, you’ve arrived at legalism.
There are stories—lots of them—in all four Gospels about Jesus’ relationship to the eremos, but this is the first story. And I want you to see it because it’s the starting place for his ministry and mission.
The wilderness isn’t the place of weakness; it’s the place of strength.
Meaning, the quiet place wasn’t a onetime thing. It was an ongoing part of his life rhythm.
When we get overbusy and life is hectic and people are vying for our time, the quiet place is the first thing to go rather than our first go to. The first thing we lose is unhurried time to just sit with God in the quiet. To pray. Read a psalm. Take an internal inventory. Let our souls catch up to our bodies.
If our theory is right and the problem is more our absence than his, more about our distraction than his disconnection,20 then the solution is fairly simple: create an environment for attention and connection to God; and I know of no better place than the eremos.
in. We start living from the surface of our lives, not the core.
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
