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September 2 - September 11, 2025
“Hurry,” he wrote, “involves excessive haste or a state of urgency. It is associated with words such as hurl, hurdle, hurly-burly (meaning “uproar”), and hurricane.” He defined it as a “state of frantic effort one falls into in response to inadequacy, fear, and guilt.”
“Love, joy, and peace…are incompatible with hurry.”
“The average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day.” (By way of contrast, the psalmist said, “I have set the LORD always before me” [Psalm 16v8, ESV]. What would my life be like if God touched my mind as frequently as I touch my phone?)
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.
But the thing is, I feel like a ghost. Half alive, half dead. More numb than anything else; flat, one dimensional. Emotionally I live with an undercurrent of a nonstop anxiety that rarely goes away, and a tinge of sadness, but mostly I just feel blaaah spiritually…empty. It’s like my soul is hollow.
Monday morning. Up early. In a hurry to get to the office. Always in a hurry.
I’m introverted and creative, and like most millennials I get bored way too easily.
In spite of all my talk about Jesus, I see a man who is emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow.
I’m so emotionally unhealthy, I’m just leaking chemical waste
Let them talk; I have new metrics now.
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 up. And for the first time in years, I’m smiling at the horizon.
haunting observation of most people in the Western world: “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”
Anybody feel a bone-deep tiredness not just in your mind or body but in your soul?
I simply ask you to hear me out.
A man whose closest friends all said he was anointed with the oil of joy more than any of his companions.9 My translation: he was the happiest person alive. Most of us don’t even think to look to Jesus for advice on how to be happy.
For me Jesus remains the most brilliant, most insightful, most thought-provoking teacher to ever walk the earth. And he walked slowly (more on that in a bit).
Hurry: the great enemy of spiritual life
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
But read the Bible: Satan doesn’t show up as a demon with a pitchfork and gravelly smoker voice or as Will Ferrell with an electric guitar and fire on Saturday Night Live. He’s far more intelligent than we give him credit for. Today, you’re far more likely to run into the enemy in the form of an alert on your phone while you’re reading your Bible or a multiday Netflix binge or a full-on dopamine addiction to Instagram or a Saturday morning at the office or another soccer game on a Sunday or commitment after commitment after commitment in a life of speed.
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 famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the de...
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“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.
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 about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.6
This new speed of life isn’t Christian; it’s anti-Christ.
Hurry and love are incompatible.
Hence, in the apostle Paul’s definition of love, the first descriptor is “patient.”8 There’s a reason people talk about “walking” with God, not “running” with God. It’s because God is love.
Case in point, Merriam-Webster: “mentally dull: stupid: naturally inert or sluggish: lacking in readiness, promptness, or willingness.”
Love, joy, and peace are the triumvirate at the heart of Jesus’s kingdom vision. All three are more than just emotions; they are overall conditions of the heart.
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.
“I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”
Not only does hurry keep us from the love, joy, and peace of the kingdom of God—the very core of what all human beings crave—but it also keeps us from God himself simply by stealing our attention.
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
very little can be done with hurry that can’t be done better without it. Especially our lives with God. And even our work for God.
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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“this twittering world” where people are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
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
“You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”
The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions!
But most historians point to 1370 as the turning point in the West’s relationship to time. That year the first public clock tower was erected in Cologne, Germany.3 Before that, time was natural. It was linked to the rotation of the earth on its axis and the four seasons. You went to bed with the moon and got up with the sun. Days were long and busy in summer, short and slow in winter. There was a rhythm to the day and even the year. Life was “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity,”4 in the words of the French medievalist Jacques Le
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We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our alarms droned their oppressive siren—not when our bodies were done resting. We became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being.
Then in 1879 you had Edison and the light bulb, which made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay, brace yourself for this next stat: before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night.6 Yes: eleven.
Is it any wonder we’re exhausted all the time?
Yet in spite of our smartphones and programmable coffeepots and dishwashers and laundry machines and toasters, most of us feel like we have less time, not more. What gives? Labor-saving devices really do save time. So where did all that time go? Answer: we spent it on other things.
One famous Senate subcommittee in 1967 was told that by 1985, the average American would work only twenty-two hours a week for twenty-seven weeks a year. Everybody thought the main problem in the future would be too much leisure.
The average American works nearly four more weeks per year than they did in 1979.9
all right around 2007, the official start date of the digital age.
it’s decreasing our IQs or at least our capacity to pay attention.
