The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
“The great danger [of today] 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.” -John Mark Comer
As I grow older, I realize that there is always more to do. Many of them are really good things. But there is always more. Today’s culture, especially American culture, glorifies busy. It’s cool to have a lot to do… “How are you?” “Oh I’m doing great, just busy!”
And I was no different. I loved filling every second of every day of my schedule with things that I deemed important. Not anymore. Thanks to JMC’s words and the Lord stirring up some conviction in my heart. I turn 21 in about half an hour, and I’m vowing to change that this year.
Here are some truths from John Mark Comer’s book that shares a title with this blog post:
Hurry is the greatest enemy of spiritual life in our day.
Love, peace, and joy are all three incompatible with hurry… they can’t coexist.
Your life is no more than the sum of what you give your attention to.
There is 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.
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you’re getting lousy results, then your time, attention, money, and life are being spent in a lousy way.
You simply can’t do everything because God has given humans limitations. What if we viewed limitations not as something to stretch and fight, but to gratefully accept as a signpost to God’s call on our souls?
Find the secret of the easy yoke. Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape, he offers a way to bear the weight. (An easy life isn’t an option, an easy yoke is.)
The way of Jesus is a way of life. Not just a set of ideas (theology) or dos and don’ts (ethics), but a lifestyle.
These quotes and paraphrases are from less than the first half of the book. The rest goes on to discuss practices and disciplines for un-hurrying your life. Some seem bizarre, far-fetched, and nothing like what our world looks like now. But why would I want to be anything like the world now? I’m stoked to gamify these practices and incorporate as many of them as possible into my life, and I would highly recommend the book and disciplines to anyone who claims to be a follower/apprentice of Jesus.
As JMC puts it- if this is too difficult for you or you don’t have time for it, then maybe you’re simply too busy to follow Jesus.
