Book Highlights:: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (highlights)
Dallas Willard said, to become the best of us, we must eliminate hurry from our lives. He had one reason: it is the great enemy of spiritual life in our days.
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. *
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. (Location 345)
What does Jesus want for our lives? Love, peace, and joy. All those three are incompatible with hurry. To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer.
I love how John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.” *
Misliving is the state where the distraction became the life itself. The only option left for those who 'mislived' is regret, often on the deathbed. What is our current contenders of distractions that might cause us to mislive?
Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens, while Jesus offers his restful yoke to develop in us a balanced and meaningful life.
Jesus waited three decades to preach his first sermon, and after only one day on the job as Messiah, he went off to the wilderness to pray and fast for forty days. Hurry is not in the man's dictionary; relationship with His Father is primary.
Space for God and love for people were the top priorities, so he was able to say no to other countless invitations.
Rule is a schedule and set of practices to order our lives around the way of Jesus; to avoid being sucked into a hurry, noise, and distraction. This set of practices involves Spiritual Discipline which was defined by Dallas Willard as:
Spiritual Discipline are activities of body and mind that purposefully undertaken to bring ourselves into effective cooperation with what God intends us to be. It involves listening intently, not just hearing or anything that passively taken.
Avoid whatever that increases the authority of body over mind.
Susanna Wesley, famed preacher John Wesley’s mother, wisely taught her children about sin’s insidious creep into even our most legitimate motivations: Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things: in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.
Permanent Notes Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things: in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.
Avoid "musts" and "oughts".
We simply go along with the many “musts” and “oughts” that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of our Lord. People must be motivated to come to church, youth must be entertained, money must be raised, and above all everyone must be happy. Moreover, we ought to be on good terms with the church and civil authorities; we ought to be liked or at least respected by a fair majority of our parishioners; we ought to move up in the ranks according to schedule; and we ought to have enough vacation and salary to live a comfortable life.
Avoid change outside yourself
That's why one of my golden rules for leading a good life is as follows: "Avoid situations in which you have to change other people."
Avoid being too hard on yourself
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
Minimalism from Joshua Becker:
Intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them — how?
Learn to enjoy things without owning them.
Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store.
This could be one of the simplest Mental Models we can practice (maybe not in the pandemic) because we get to practice Slow Living, combat the urge to hustle, hurry, and do-it-fast. Take it slow.
Solitude, Mindfulness, and Isolation:
{{table}}
Solitude
Isolation
Engagement
Escape
Safety
Danger
Intentional
Reactionary
Andrew Sullivan on Silence :
Andrew Sullivan wrote this: Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn…. If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. (Location 1554)
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. (Location 2762)
I'm intrigued by this choice of words: People of substance.