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September 10 - September 20, 2020
Twenty centuries ago another wise man said, “[Make] the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5v16, ESV). I used to think that meant the days are full of sensuality and fleshly temptation. And of course, they are. But I think it mostly means that the life we were intended to live must be lived in time. And we are so used to spiritually mediocre days—days lived in irritation and fear and self-preoccupation and frenzy—that we throw our lives away in a hurry.
The Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han ends his book The Burnout Society with a haunting observation of most people in the Western world: “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”
“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 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.
Michael Zigarelli from the Charleston Southern University School of Business conducted the Obstacles to Growth Survey of over twenty thousand Christians across the globe and identified busyness as a major distraction from spiritual life. Listen carefully to his hypothesis: It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions
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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
In his book Three Mile an Hour God, the late Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama put this language around it: 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
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
Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more
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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 average American works nearly four more weeks per year than they did in 1979.9
touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day. Each user is on his or her phone for two and a half hours over seventy-six sessions.14
Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.21
Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things…. Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.28
More and more experts are weighing in. Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness. Here’s another: A malaise in which a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task
faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.2
Because in an ironic catch-22, the things that make for rest actually take a bit of emotional energy and self-discipline.
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. In one recent study 39 percent of Americans reported being more anxious than they were a year ago.8 That’s not something to keep your eye on; it’s an emotional epidemic.
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. That bodes well
for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in his world.
Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.
What you hear very little of—inside or outside the church—is accepting your limitations.
We live in a culture that wants to transgress all limitations, not accept them—to cheat time and space.
Our bodies. As I said, unlike Luke Skywalker, we can be in only one place at a time. Hence the rub on limitations.
“We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”
Jesus’ agenda is to make wounded people whole.
We have to learn to say no. Constantly. As Anne Lamott so humorously pointed out, “ ‘No’ is a complete sentence.”
the average guy spends ten thousand hours playing video games by age twenty-one.15
And how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).
“burnout isn’t a place to visit and come back from; it’s our permanent residence.”
Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the “second mile,” turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone else around us does…. It’s a strategy bound to fail.6
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
We read the stories of Jesus—his joy, his resolute peace through uncertainty, his unanxious presence, his relaxed manner and how in the moment he was—and think, I want that life. We hear his open invite to “life…to the full” and think, Sign me up. We hear about his easy yoke and soul-deep rest and think, Gosh, yes, heck yes. I need that. But then we’re not willing to adopt his lifestyle. 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,
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The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life…. But Jesus as the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor.
There’s a saying in business literature that I love: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Usually this is applied to widgets and the bottom line, but I love it for life as a whole.
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…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment. Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount [his yoke] will develop in us a balance and a “way” of carrying life that will give more rest than the way we have been living.8
Again: 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.
What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. It’s a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God, to work and rest and play and eat and drink and hang out with your friends and run errands and catch up on the news, all out of a place of deep, loving enjoyment of the Father’s company. 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
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A discipline is a way to access power.
As we said earlier, one of the great problems of spirituality in our day and age that so few people feel safe enough to admit is how separated we feel from God. We rarely experience God’s presence throughout our day. “Love, joy, and peace” does not describe the felt experience of many Christians. Often we come to church hoping for a God hit—a fleeting moment of connection to God before we return to the secular wasteland.
Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn…. If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.26
Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness.18
1. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item?
2. Before you buy, ask yourself, By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?
3. Never impulse buy.
4. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things.
5. When you can, share.
Get into the habit of giving things away.
