The Ruthless Elimination Of Hurry Quotes

Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

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.

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

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.

Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: 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.

Hurry is violence on the soul.

Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control.

An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.

Many have noted that the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.

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.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: 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. That bodes well for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in his world. But not for those who give their attention to the 24-7 news cycle of outrage and anxiety and emotion-charged drama or the nonstop feed of celebrity gossip, titillation, and cultural drivel. (As if we “give” it in the first place; much of it is stolen by a clever algorithm out to monetize our precious attention.) But again: we become what we give our attention to, for better or worse.

Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.21

One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.

But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.

Because where you put your resources is where you put your heart. It’s the steering wheel to your engine of desire.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

Hurry and love are incompatible.

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….

the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character.

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.

And hurry is a form of violence on the soul.

In the cruciform kingdom, only the bad things die: image and status and bragging rights, all vanity.

margin is “the space between our load and our limits.

We hear the refrain “I’m great, just busy” so often we assume pathological busyness is okay. After all, everybody else is busy too. But what if busyness isn’t healthy? What if it’s an airborne contagion, wreaking havoc on our collective soul?

It’s been proven by study after study: there is zero correlation between hurry and productivity. In fact, once you work a certain number of hours in a week, your productivity plummets. Wanna know what the number is? Fifty hours. Ironic: that’s about a six-day workweek. One study found that there was zero difference in productivity between workers who logged seventy hours and those who logged fifty-five.15 Could God be speaking to us even through our bodies?

Hurry and love are like oil and water; they simply do not mix.

happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion.

There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

The Hebrew word Shabbat means ‘to stop.’ But it can also be translated ‘to delight.’ It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.

To follow Jesus, especially in the Western world, is to live in that same tension between grateful, happy enjoyment of nice, beautiful things, and simplicity. And when in doubt, to err on the side of generous, simple living.

At this point in my life, I’m just trying to not miss the goodness of each day, and bring my best self to it.

Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept the hard as a pathway to peace. Abide.

Every...single...thing that we let into our minds will have an effect on our souls.

We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath

Hurry is the root problem underneath so many of the symptoms of toxicity in our world.

When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.

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.2

Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,”7 not the kingdom of entertainment.

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.11

Aim at an easy life and your actual life will be marked by a gnawing angst and frustration; aim at an easy yoke and, as John Ortberg once said, “Your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow.

For many of us the great danger 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. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.14

Image and dust. To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential. We have the Divine’s capacity in our DNA. We’re like God. We were created to “image” his behavior, to rule like he does, to gather up the raw materials of our planet and reshape them into a world for human beings to flourish and thrive. But that’s only half the story. We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers. Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite. Image and dust

Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world.

To allow yourself to be in the panic, feeling it roll over you, and not going for the fix.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.

Each moment is full of goodness. Why are we in such a hurry to rush on to the next one? There's so much here to see, to enjoy, to gratefully receive, to celebrate, to share.

The reality is, I want the life, but I’m not willing to adopt the lifestyle behind it. I think that’s how a lot of us feel about Jesus.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day (Dallas Willard qtd. in Ortberg)

in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.

Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”13

This all reminds me of a line from Psalm 39: “In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.”23

Salvation is healing. Even the etymology of our English word salvation comes from the Latin salve.

Or in the language of math: infinite desire – finite soul = restlessness.

The point of a trellis isn’t to make the vines stand up straight in neat rows, but rather to attain a rich, deep glass of wine. It’s to create space for the vine to grow and bear fruit.

Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke—to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease. To step out of the burnout society to a life of soul rest.

Apparently, I’m known as a “reader.” I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV … 2,737.5 hours.

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.

True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.36

Do you ever catch yourself with the sneaking suspicion that you’ll wake up on your deathbed with this nagging sense that somehow, in all the hurry and busyness and frenetic activity, you missed the most important things?

What's hard isn't following Jesus. What's hard is following myself, doing my life my way; therein lies the path to exhaustion. With Jesus there's still a yoke, a weight to life, but it's an easy yoke, and we never carry it alone.

If you want to experience the life “to the full” of Jesus, his nonstop, conscious enjoyment of God’s presence and world, all you have to do is adopt not only his theology and ethics but also his lifestyle. Just follow his way. That’s it!

Walter Brueggemann has this great line: “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.”8 It’s true. Watch out for the Sabbath. It will mess with you. First it will mess with one day of your week; then it will mess with your whole life.

Ortberg has said, For many of us the great danger 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. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness…. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion….

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.

What if the formula “more stuff equals more happiness” is bad math? What if more stuff often just equals more stress? More hours at the office, more debt, more years working in a job I don’t feel called to, more time wasted cleaning and maintaining and fixing and playing with and organizing and reorganizing and updating all that junk I don’t even need. What if more stuff actually equals less of what matters most? Less time. Less financial freedom. Less generosity, which according to Jesus is where the real joy is. Less peace, as I hurry my way through the mall parking lot. Less focus on what life is actually about. Less mental real estate for creativity. Less relationships. Less margin. Less prayer. Less of what I actually ache for? What if I were to reject my culture’s messaging as a half-truth at best, if not a full-on lie, and live into another message? Another gospel?

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.

All too often our hurry is a sign of something else. Something deeper. Usually that we’re running away from something—father wounds, childhood trauma, last names, deep insecurity or deficits of self-worth, fear of failure, pathological inability to accept the limitations of our humanity, or simply boredom with the mundanity of middle life.

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. The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.

Because the 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.

In reality Jesus’ moral teachings aren’t arbitrary at all. They are laws, yes. But moral laws are no different from scientific laws like E = mc2 or gravity.26 They are statements about how the world actually works. And if you ignore them, not only do you rupture relationship with God, but you also go against the grain of the universe he created.

Love, joy, and peace are the triumvirate at the heart of Jesus’s kingdom vision. All three are more than just emotions; they are overall conditions of the heart. They aren’t just pleasant feelings; they are the kinds of people we become through our apprenticeship to Jesus, who embodies all three ad infinitum. And all three are incompatible with hurry.

Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.

Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it. It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment. It kills wisdom; 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. Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity…name your value. Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.

More recently, Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5 Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control. To make a bad problem worse, this is exacerbated by our cultural moment of digital marketing from a society built around the twin gods of accumulation and accomplishment. Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness. They say we see upward of four thousand ads a day, all designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies. Buy this. Do this. Eat this. Drink this. Have this. Watch this. Be this. In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller opined, “It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.”6 Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.

Here from Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.12

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

We live in a culture that wants to transgress all limitations, not accept them—to cheat time and space. To “be like God.

Relentlessness

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. Even now there are rare moments when I’ll think, What if? I had to make peace with who I am. And who I’m not. I had to let go of the envy, the fantasy, the cancerous restlessness. To accept, gratefully: this is my life.

with hurry, we always lose more than we gain. Here for the win, Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C.

For many of us the great danger 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. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

You got letters after your name but learned the hard way that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. You made a lot of money but never grew rich in the things that matter most. Which ironically, aren't things at all. p71

think it’s wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology. Technological, and even economic, progress does not necessarily equal human progress.

We have only so much capacity. I’m an introvert. I’m actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small.

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.

Pretty much the only place we can be alone with our thoughts anymore is in the shower, and it’s only a matter of time until our devices are waterproof, which, in turn, will trigger the apocalypse.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become

How do we “live deliberately” without going off into the forest to scavenge our own food or abandoning our family? How do we slow down, simplify, and live deliberately right in the middle of the chaos of the noisy, fast-paced, urban, digital world we call home?

As Gandhi wisely said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.

hurry is a form of violence on the soul.

don’t look at how you treat a colleague or neighbor; look at how you treat those closest to you: your spouse, children, roommate, etc.

You’re busier than ever before yet still feel like you don’t have time for what really matters to you. Months often go by or years—or, God forbid, maybe it’s been decades—and you realize you still haven’t gotten around to all the things you said were the most important in your life.

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

So everywhere Jesus went, he was constantly offering an invitation. Usually it sounded like this: Come, follow me.3 Or like this: Come, be my apprentice.

When the spiritual disciplines (Bible reading, prayer, Sabbath, and so on) become an end in and of themselves, you’ve arrived at legalism. Therein lies death, not life.