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May 8 - May 14, 2025
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.
Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.
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
Hence, in the apostle Paul’s definition of love, the first descriptor is “patient.”8
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.
wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm.
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.
A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human. His way to shoulder the (at times crippling) weight of life—marriage,
Keep in mind, the Greek word that we translate “salvation” is soteria; it’s the same word we translate “healing.” When you’re reading the New Testament and you read that somebody was “healed” by Jesus and then you read somebody else was “saved” by Jesus, you’re reading the same Greek word. Salvation is healing.
A yoke is a work instrument. Thus when Jesus offers a yoke he offers what we might think tired workers need least. They need a mattress or a vacation, not a yoke.
But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment.
Matthew 3,
eremos, and it has a wide array of meanings. It can be translated desert deserted place desolate place solitary place lonely place quiet place (my personal favorite) wilderness
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” because it was there, and only there, that Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers. It was only after a month and a half of prayer and fasting in the quiet place that he had the capacity to take on the devil himself and walk away unscathed.
Luke 5:
Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.15 In Greek that phrase “lonely places”
Silence and solitude Through the years this practice of Jesus has come to be called “silence and solitude.”
The Sabbath
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
Yet sadly, often misreading it. In context, Jesus was beating up on a legalistic, guilt-heavy religious culture that had totally missed the Father’s heart behind the command to slow down one day a week.
Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness.
To start with, God blessed the animal kingdom with an invocation: “Be fruitful and multiply.”17 Then he blessed humanity the same way: “Be fruitful and multiply.”18 And then God blessed the Sabbath. Wait, so God blessed animals, humans, and then…a day? Mmm. What does that mean? It means that the Sabbath—just like an animal or a human being—has the life-giving capacity to procreate. To fill the world up with more life.
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth.
Matthew 6
if people said you had a “healthy” eye, it had a double meaning. It meant that (1) you were focused and living with a high degree of intentionality in life, and (2) you were generous to the poor.
silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing—have
Our days of pain are the building blocks of our character. Our crucible of Christlikeness.
Because my Rabbi teaches that happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion.
Next steps to move forward on a lifelong journey in which you never “arrive.”
Thessalonians.
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.
To live a quiet life in a world of noise is a fight, a war of attrition, a calm rebellion against the status quo. And like any fight, death comes with the territory. As does sacrifice. For me, I had to die to who I could have been if I’d stayed on the path of upward mobility.
