The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

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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.” The ideas themselves I liked and will be trying but I wish the author gave more concrete examples on how to execute. There’s actually an online workbook that’s linked at the end of the book that I thought was soo helpful, I wish he just included that in the book itself, don’t know why he didn’t. Because without that most of the book was one of two things: 1) How we got to having such rushed lives and why it is bad for us (which I think the person reading is generally aware of hence why they are reading the book?) and 2) why each of his four ideas are important/help (with heavy emphasis here on sourcing the Bible and Jesus). This book artfully, winsomely, and wisely walks us to the wonder of life in Christ and the joy that can be ours when we keep company with Jesus by living in the unhurried rhythms of grace.

I am the director and teacher of Practicing the Way, founding pastor of Bridgetown Church and New York Times bestselling author of Live No Lies. My growing passion is the intersection of spiritual formation and post-Christian culture. The gnawing questions that get me out of bed in the morning are, how do we experience life with God? And how do we change to become more like Jesus? To that end, I can regularly be found reading the desert fathers and mothers, ancient saints and obscure contemplatives, modern psychologists and social scientists, philosophers like Dallas Willard, and op-eds from the New York Times. This book was recommended by Dharius Daniels which really put "things" into perspective and gets you of the hamster wheel of life. Because of technology, we no longer have the ability, the will, or appreciate the value of, being in silence. Part three is the development of silence and solitude, sabbath, simplicity and slowing as spiritual disciplines. John Mark asks one simple question: How did Jesus do it? These are four practices he has adopted in his life to improve his relationship with time. The outcomes are improved relationships in every sphere of his life. Each section is full of advice on why they are essential and how they can become daily, weekly and monthly habits. It hasn’t always been this way, even in America. Yes, our nation is a social experiment built around the pursuit of happiness. But it wasn’t until quite recently that we redefined happiness as making lots of money and owning lots of stuff.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?” 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” The Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han ends his book The Burnout Society with a haunting observation of most people in the Western world:“They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Our personalities and emotional wiring. We have only so much capacity. I’m an introvert. I’m actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small. I’m also melancholy by nature. I hate to admit it, but some people have a lot more capacity than I do. I still remember reading the counsel that Dallas Willard gave John Ortberg after he’d moved to Chicago to join the staff of a large church there. (John writes about this the chapter titled “An Unhurried Life” in The Life You’ve Always Wanted . He doesn’t mention Dallas by name there, but instead talks about a “wise friend.”) What was John’s question? Our giftings. On a similar note as above, I will simply never have the giftings of many of the people I most look up to. Comparison just eats away at our joy, doesn’t it?

You can tell Comer is a husband and father with kids. You can tell he came from a tiring, fast-paced, competitive rat race. In this book, he urges people to unplug, disconnect, slow down, isolate, say no, observe the sabbath, and embrace simplicity. I get it. Some people need to hear that. But that's not something I struggle with. I already know how to say "no." I need to learn how to say "yes." 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 worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Comer meets with John Ortberg, a California-based pastor and writer, who shares a story about Dallas Williard, who was a philosopher and spiritual leader at USC:A discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort. It hits me like a freight train: 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.