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

by John Mark Comer

But love is painfully time consuming. All parents know this, as do all lovers and most long-term friends.

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

before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night.

The average American works nearly four more weeks per year than they did in 1979.9

Word of advice from a fellow eggshell-expert: to self-diagnose don’t look at how you treat a colleague or neighbor; look at how you treat those closest to you: your spouse, children, roommate, etc. _____

Do you ever catch yourself with the sneaking suspicion that you’ll wake up on your deathbed with this nagging sense that somehow, in all the hurry and busyness and frenetic activity, you missed the most important things? Somehow you started a business but ended a marriage. You got your kids to their dream colleges but never taught them the way of Jesus. You got letters after your name but learned the hard way that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. You made a lot of money but never grew rich in the things that matter most. Which, ironically, aren’t things at all. You watched all fourteen seasons of ____________ but never learned to love prayer.

When we don’t practice this Jesus soul habit, we reap the consequences: We feel distant from God and end up living off somebody else’s spirituality, via a podcast feed or book or one-page devotional we read before we rush out the door to work.

Recently I read a survey done by a doctor who cited the happiest people on earth. Near the top of the list was a group of Christians called Seventh-day Adventists, who are religious, literally, about the Sabbath. This doctor noted that they lived ten years longer than the average American.19 I did the math: if I Sabbath every seven days, it adds up to—wait for it—ten years over a lifetime.