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August 26, 2024
Let God take care of the world.
Change is slow, gradual, and intermittent; three steps forward, a step or two back. Some days I nail it; others, I slip back into hurry. But for the first time in years, I’m moving toward maturity, one inch at a time. Becoming more like Jesus. And more like my best self.
I’m on the unpaved road with no clue where it leads, but that’s okay. I honestly value who I’m becoming over where I end
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 number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
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 Meaning, very little can be done with hurry that can’t be done better without it.
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.
used to be that leisure was a sign of wealth. People with more money spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club. But that’s changed. Now busyness is a sign of wealth.
slot machines make more money than the film industry and baseball combined, even though they take only a few quarters at a time. Because the slot machine is addictive. And those small amounts of money feel inconsequential in the moment. It’s just a few quarters, right? Or five bucks, or twenty. But over time they add up.
You find yourself stuck in the negative feedback loop of socially acceptable addictions.
when you get overbusy, the things that are truly life giving for your soul are the first to go rather than your first go to—such as a quiet time in the morning, Scripture, prayer, Sabbath, worship on Sunday, a meal with your community, and so on.
When we get overbusy, we get overtired, and when we get overtired, we don’t have the energy or discipline to do what we need most for our souls.
And even when you’re alone, you come face to face with the void that is your soul and immediately run back to the familiar groove of busyness and digital distraction.
Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
The poet Mary Oliver, not a Christian but a lifelong spiritual seeker, wrote something similar: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
turn our minds’ attention toward the God who is always with us in the now. As apprentices of Jesus, this is our main task and the locus of the devil’s stratagem against us.
Jesus wisely said our hearts will follow behind our treasures.12 Usually we interpret treasure to mean our two basic resources: time and money. But an even more precious resource is attention. Without it our spiritual lives are stillborn in the womb. Because attention leads to awareness.
in the chronic problem of human beings’ felt experience of distance from God, God isn’t usually the culprit. 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.
There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.
“We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”
Life is a series of choices. Every yes is a thousand nos. Every activity we give our time to is a thousand other activities we can’t give our time to.
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.
Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
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.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
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, death is always followed by resurrection.
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.
“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. If the results you are getting are lousy—anxiety at a simmer, mild depression, high levels of stress, chronic emotional burnout, little to no sense of the presence of God, an inability to focus your mind on the things that make for life, etc.—then the odds are very good that something about the system that is your life is off kilter. The way you’ve organized your morning (or evening) routine, your schedule, your budget, your relationship to
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Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) said that we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values.
The hard truth is that following Jesus is something you do. A practice, as much as a faith. At their core the practices of Jesus are about a relationship. With the God he called Father. And all relationships take time.
When the spiritual disciplines (Bible reading, prayer, Sabbath, and so on) become an end in and of themselves, you’ve arrived at legalism. Therein lies death, not life.
A discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.
Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
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.
Saint Augustine said entering silence is “entering into joy.”
God’s presence wasn’t an idea in my head but a felt experience. All around me, in me.
Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape.
Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter.
In his masterpiece Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster wrote, “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”
We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.
“To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E.”
In silence and solitude our souls finally come home. That’s what Jesus meant by “abide,”
