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

by John Mark Comer

Right now you have everything you need to live a happy, content life; you have access to the Father. To his loving attention.

I like rules. There, I said it. Why is everybody so down on rules? What did rules ever do to them? Was there a recent imperialistic rule kleptocracy I missed? Rules make me feel safe. When I know the rules, I breathe easy.

And, well, I like to have a plan. For everything. I literally sit down before my day off and plan it out by the hour.

I’ve started to notice that anti-rule people are often anti-schedule people; and anti-schedule people frequently live in a way that is reactive, not proactive.

Counterhabits to wage war against what the futurist David Zach called “hyperliving—skimming along the surface of life”

Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.

do not let your phone set your emotional equilibrium and your news feed set your view of the world.

Journalism is a for-profit business—this is capitalism, friends, no matter how far left the journalist may sound. And the reality is, for reasons both neurobiological and theological, bad news sells.

let prayer set your emotional equilibrium and Scripture set your view of the world. Begin your day in the spirit of God’s presence and the truth of his Scriptures.

self-imposed guardrails

And I loathe Facebook; it’s like the dregs of conservative Christianity.

When asked about the competition from Amazon Prime and other up-and-coming streaming services, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, shrugged. He said their biggest competition is sleep.

Multitasking is just sleight of hand for switching back and forth between a lot of different tasks so I can do them all poorly instead of doing one well.

When I was a kid, we prided ourselves on how fast we walked. Weird, but true. I remember Christmas shopping with my dad at the mall and just flying past the rest of the shoppers—suckers!

I cannot tell you how many tiffs we got into as a newly married couple over the speed of our walking!

I don’t journal a lot, just enough to keep focused and justify a Moleskine on my desk.

Then I start to imagine myself breathing in the Holy Spirit and breathing out all the agitation of the day. I turn my breathing into a prayer, inhaling the fruit of the Spirit, one at a time… Breathe in love, breathe out the anger… Breathe in joy, breathe out the sadness and pain… Breathe in peace, breathe out the anxiety and uncertainty of tomorrow… Breathe in patience, breathe out the hurry of my life…

Tim Keller, however, can: Persons who meditate become people of substance who have thought things out and have deep convictions, who can explain difficult concepts in simple language, and who have good reasons behind everything they do. Many people do not meditate. They skim everything, picking and choosing on impulse, having no thought-out reasons for their behavior. Following whims, they live shallow lives.17 In a cultural moment of shallow, mindfulness and meditation are a step toward the deep waters.

A recent study from Finland’s University of Tampere found that happiness levels peak on day eight of vacation and then hit a plateau.

Our staff has a rule of life that we sign as part of our employment contracts; on it we literally commit to take all our vacation days each year.

Fast food is fast, not food. Real food takes time. We’re okay with that.

“At this point in my life, I’m just trying to not miss the goodness of each day, and bring my best self to it.”

I’ve reorganized my life around three very simple goals: Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.

The moment is where you find God, find your soul, find your life. Life isn’t “out there” in the next dopamine hit, the next task, the next experience; it’s right here, now.

Even on the bad days, in the hard moments, in the pain, the crisis, or disappointment, the diagnosis, the grief over all the ways life is less than what it could or should be, even then, I think of AA’s wonderful line: “Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as [Jesus] did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”

Our days of pain are the building blocks of our character. Our crucible of Christlikeness. I rarely welcome them—I’m not that far down the path, not yet—but I accept them. Because my Rabbi teaches that happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.

That’s the goal, the end, the vision of success: a quiet life.

Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet.11

The question is simply: What are you fighting for? Survival of the fittest? Some perversion of the American dream? Or something better?

In the years to come, our world will most likely go from fast to faster; more hurried, more soulless, more vapid; “deceiving and being deceived.”14 Will you traverse that road? Will you follow the same old, tired, uncreative story of hurry and busyness and noisy, materialistic, propagandized living? Just try to add in a little Jesus as you careen through life? Make it to church when you can? Pray when you find the time? Mostly just stay ahead of the wolf pack? Or… Will you remember there’s another road, another way? Will you off-ramp onto the narrow path? Will you radically alter the pace of your life to take up the easy yoke of Jesus? And when you fail, begin again. This time: slowly.