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

by John Mark Comer

What would my life be like if God touched my mind as frequently as I touch my phone?)

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

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.5

We live in a culture of more. A culture of gaping, unquenchable lust. For everything. Lust for more food, more drink, more clothes, more devices, more apps, more things, more square footage, more experiences, more stamps on the passport—more. We have so much crap we don’t need; we, like Egypt, have to build our own supply cities. We call them storage units, and they are a $38 billion industry in the US alone,29 taking up 2.3 billion square feet, enough for every single American to have over seven square feet to themselves.30 Meaning, we could practically house our entire nation—in our storage units.

So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.35

We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.9 Sound like an evil genius from an Orwellian sci-fi movie? Nah. That was Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers.

Consumeristic society in America springs forth