The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (highlights)

So he calls up Willard and asks, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?” There’s a long silence on the other end of the line… According to John, “With Willard there’s always a long silence on the other end of the line.” Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” (Location 284)

“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” (Location 292)

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. (Location 306)

“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.” (Location 314)

The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry. (Location 321)

In his book Three Mile an Hour God, the late Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama put this language around it:

To 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. (Location 363)

Here for the win, Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C. S. Lewis: To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it. (Location 370)

Here are my ten symptoms of hurry sickness. (Location 630)

I love how John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.” (Location 726)

William Irvine called it “misliving.” In his book A Guide to the Good Life, he wrote: There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, 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. (Location 736)

Peter Scazzero’s line: “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.” (Location 849)

Permanent Notes Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. (Location 1046)

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. Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount his yoke

People all over the world—outside the church and in—are looking for an escape, a way out from under the crushing weight to life this side of Eden. But there is no escaping it. The best the world can offer is a temporary distraction to delay the inevitable or deny the inescapable. That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At his side. Like two oxen in a field, tied shoulder to shoulder. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At his pace. Slow, unhurried, present to the moment, full of love and joy and peace. An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.9 (Location 1080)

Jesus’ schedule was full. To the brim at times. In a good way. Yet he never came off hurried. (Location 1113)

this is the man who waited three decades to preach his first sermon, and after one day on the job as Messiah, he went off to the wilderness for forty days to pray. Nothing could hurry this man. (Location 1116)

my point is simple: he put on display an unhurried life, where space for God and love for people were the top priorities, and because he said yes to the Father and his kingdom, he constantly said no to countless other invitations. (Location 1133)

Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) said that we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values. That line isn’t from the Bible, but my guess is, if Jesus heard that, he would smile and nod. (Location 1146)

A rule was a schedule and set of practices to order your life around the way of Jesus in community. It was a way to keep from getting sucked into the hurry, busyness, noise, and distraction of regular life. A way to slow down. A way to live into what really matters: what Jesus called abiding.6 Key relationships with family and community. The work God has set before us. A healthy soul. You know, the good stuff. (Location 1153)

The word rule comes from the Latin word regula, which literally means “a straight piece of wood,” (think: ruler), but it was also used for a trellis. Think of Jesus’ teaching on abiding in the vine from John 15, one of his most important teachings on emotional health and spiritual life. Now think of a pleasant wine-tasting memory. What’s underneath every thriving vine? A trellis. A structure to hold up the vine so it can grow and bear fruit. You see the word picture? What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. (Location 1158)

Are you ready to construct a trellis for your vine? A schedule, a practice (or two) to create space for life with Jesus? To make room for love and joy and peace to become your default settings? Are you ready to arrange (or rearrange) your days so that Jesus’ life becomes your new normal? (Location 1194)

Dallas Willard’s definition of a spiritual discipline: The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself. (Location 1257)

Andrew Sullivan, in his manifesto for silence in an age of noise, wrote this: There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any. (Location 1312)

Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former. (Location 1467)

mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It’s the same thing, just missing the best part—Jesus. (Location 1548)

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)

One of the most famous lines of the way of Jesus post–New Testament is from Saint Augustine. Writing at the fall of the Roman Empire, the bishop of Hippo said this: You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. (Location 1617)

Sabbath isn’t just a twenty-four-hour time slot in your weekly schedule; it’s a spirit of restfulness that goes with you throughout your week. A way of living with “ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer.” A way of working from rest, not for rest, with nothing to prove. A way of bearing fruit from abiding, not ambition. (Location 1940)

Brueggemann said so eloquently: People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.37 (Location 1942)

Every single thing you buy costs you not only money but also time. (Location 2164)

Permanent Notes Minimalism isn’t about living with nothing; it’s about living with less. (Location 2278)

Joshua Becker, a follower of Jesus and former pastor who now writes about minimalism full time, defined it these ways: The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them. (Location 2287)

Learn to enjoy things without owning them. (Location 2425)

Dallas Willard so astutely pointed out, the cost of discipleship is high, but the cost of non-discipleship is even higher. (Location 2476)

Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store. (Location 2578)

But here’s the deeper motivation: it’s wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want, whether through a practice as intense as fasting or as minor as picking the longest checkout line. That way when somebody else denies us from getting what we want, we don’t respond with anger. We’re already acclimated. We don’t have to get our way to be happy. (Location 2584)

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)