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

by John Mark Comer

Here it is: What if I changed my 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.

“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.

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

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.

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

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

The point I’m driving toward is this: an overbusy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it’s toxic.

And as I said before: hurry is a threat not only to our emotional health but to our spiritual lives as well.

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.”13

Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time.

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.

If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.

The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life….

If you want to experience the life “to the full” of Jesus, his nonstop, conscious enjoyment of God’s presence and world, all you have to do is adopt not only his theology and ethics but also his lifestyle. Just follow his way.

Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger.

Solitude is how you open yourself up to God;

Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity.

And solitude—as somber as it sounds—is anything but loneliness.

“Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life…. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.21

What do we do with all this pent-up, unsatisfied desire? This restlessness?

The Jesus tradition would offer this: human desire is infinite because we were made to live with God forever in his world and nothing less will ever satisfy us, so our only hope is to put desire back in its proper place on God.

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.

All week long we work, we play, we cook, we clean, we shop, we exercise, we answer text messages, we inhabit the modern world, but finally we hit a limit. On the Sabbath, we slow down; more than that, we come to a full stop.

One of the surprising things I learned when I began to practice Sabbath is that to really enjoy the seventh day, you have to slow down the other six days. You can’t go ninety miles per hour all week, running the pedal to the floor, harrowing your soul to the bone for six days straight, and then expect to slam on the brakes for Sabbath and immediately feel zen awesome. You have to find the rhythm. As we used to say when I played in indie rock bands, “Find the pocket.”

But here’s the deeper motivation: it’s wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want, whether through a practice as intense as fasting or as minor as picking the longest checkout line. That way when somebody else denies us from getting what we want, we don’t respond with anger.

I’ve reorganized my life around three very simple goals: Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.

But Paul says we are to aim our ambition—the pent-up energy and drive that we all have at some level—at something else entirely: a quiet life.