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

by John Mark Comer

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. We feel distant from ourselves. We lose sight of our identities and callings. We get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. We feel an undercurrent of anxiety that rarely, if ever, goes away. This sense that we’re always behind, always playing catch up, never done. Then we get exhausted. We wake up, and our first thoughts are, Already? I can’t wait to go to bed…We lag through our days, our low-grade energy on loan from our stimulants of choice. Even when we catch up on our sleep, we feel a deeper kind of tired. Then we turn to our escapes of choice. We run out of energy to do what’s actually life giving for our souls, say, prayer. And instead we turn to the cheap fix—another glass of wine, a new show streaming online, our social media feeds, porn. We become easy prey for the tempter. Just furthering our sense of distance from God and our souls. Then emotional unhealth sets in. We start living from the surface of our lives, not the core. We’re reactionary. The smallest thing is a trigger—a throwaway line from the boss, a snide comment from a coworker, a suggestion from a spouse or roommate—it doesn’t take much. We lose our tempers. Bark at our kids. Get defensive. Sulk. Feel angry or sad, often both.