The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer

(New York: WaterBrook, 2019-10-29), 304

1) Hurry is antithetical to the spiritual life.
2) Read the Gospels as a biography of Jesus and manual for how to live like he did. He demonstrates how to live, and then says "Follow me."

"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day"
–Dallas Willard (19)

Notes


Contents


Foreword

by John Ortberg

  • "The good of being delivered from hurry is not simply pleasure but the ability to do calmly and effectively—with strength and joy—that which really matters." (xiii)
  • "To choose to live an unhurried life in our day is somewhat like taking a vow of poverty in earlier centuries; it is scary. It is an act of faith. But there are deeper riches on the other side." (xiv)

Prologue: Autobiography of an epidemic

  • Hurry: "It's like me soul is hollow." (2)
  • "My dream is to slow down." (7)

Part one: The Problem

Chapter 1: Hurry: the great enemy of the spiritual life

Summary: Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life.

  • Read Dallas Willard, starting with Renovation of the Heart (the best all-in-one place to read his work, more references in the endnotes, 17)
  • Willard: "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day" (19)
  • Corrie ten Boom: "If the devil can't make you sin, he'll make you busy." → both sin and business cut off our connection to God (20)
  • "Hurry and love are incompatible." (23)
  • "If there's a secret to happiness, it's simple—presence in the moment." (24)
  • "Very little can be done with hurry that can't be done better without it." (25-26)

Chapter 2: A brief history of speed

Summary: Our world is too fast.

  • Clocks create artificial time where we listen to machines rather than to our bodies and nature (30-31)
  • The Shallows (36) and Brave New World (40)
  • "I think it's wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology." (42)

Chapter 3: Something is deeply wrong

Summary: Hurry is dangerous.

  • "Hurry is a form of violence on the soul." (47)
  • Symptoms of "Hurry Sickness" (48)
    1. Irritability
    2. Hypersensitivity
    3. Restlessness
    4. Workaholism (nonstop activity)
    5. Emotional numbness
    6. Out-of-order priorities
    7. Lack of care for your body
    8. Escapist behaviors
    9. Slippage of spiritual disciplines
    10. Isolation
  • Mary Oliver: "Attention is the beginning of devotion." (53) Because attention leads to awareness and what you give your attention to is the person you become (54)
  • "Your life is no more than the sum of what you give your attention to." (55)

Part two: The solution

Chapter 4: Hint: the solution isn't more time

Summary: Make the most of your time.

  • "The solution is not more time. It's to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters." (62)
  • Peter Scazzero: "We find God's will for our lives in our limitations." (69)
  • "Life is a series of choices. Every yes is a thousand nos." (70)
  • "The average guy spends ten thousand hours playing video games by age twenty-one." (71)
  • The Simple Truth Behind Reading 200 Books a Year (72)
  • Eph-05: "Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil." (73)

Chapter 5: The secret of the easy yoke

Summary: Model your life after that of Jesus.

  • Be be a disciple, to apprentice under Jesus, you need to organize your life around three goals (77):
    1. Be with Jesus
    2. Become like Jesus
    3. Do what he would do if he were you
  • "The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus." (77)
  • "Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle. If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus." (82)
  • Take Jesus' life (in his habits and practices) as a model for your own. (86)
  • Mt-11: The "easy yoke" of Jesus is not a burden to carry, but the equipment to carry the burdens we already have (87)

Chapter 6: What we're really talking about is a rule of life

Summary: Live 'freely and lightly' like Jesus.

  • Jesus was rarely in a hurry (89), and fiercely present (91)
  • Jesus lived "freely and lightly. Free of all the discontent and distraction that comes from too much money and stuff we don't need. 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." (92-93)
  • "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,' not the kingdom of entertainment." (96)

Intermission: Wait, what are the spiritual disciplines again?

Summary: Read the Gospels as a biography of Jesus and imitate him.

  • The Gospels are biographies of Jesus, so we should be attentive to his spiritual disciplines and imitate them. (103)
  • Dallas Willard's definition of Spiritual Disciplines: "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." (111)
  • Jesus doesn't command us in spiritual disciplines: He just does these practices and then says, "Follow me." (113)

Part three: Four practices for unhurrying your life

Chapter 7: Silence and solitude

Summary: Nourish your soul with silence and solitude.

  • "Little moments of boredom are potential portals to prayer." (120)
  • "The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God, downing out the one input we most need." (122)
  • We need silence both externally and internally (133)
  • "Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul." (134)
  • Comer quotes (and misinterprets) Mother Teresa's counsel to Nouwen: "Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong...you will be fine!" (136)
  • "Mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It's the same thing, just missing the best part—Jesus." (140)
  • Andrew Sullivan: "The greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction." (140)

Chapter 8: Sabbath

Summary: The Sabbath is the anchor of our spiritual disciplines.

  • Desire is infinite, but we are finite, and the result is restlessness. Our only hope is to put desire back in its proper place on God and our other desires below God (145-146).
  • Sabbath means "to stop" (148)
  • "Sabbath is more than just a day; it's a way of being in the world . It's a spirit of restfulness that comes from abiding, from living in the Father's loving presence all week long." (149)
  • "The Sabbath is the primary discipline by which we cultivate the spirit of restfulness in our lives as a whole" (150). "Sabbath is the anchor discipline of the people of God" (163).
  • Dan Allender: "The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight." (155)
  • "God eventually has to command the Sabbath. Does that strike you as odd? It's like commanding ice cream or live music or beach days." (159)
  • "On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship." (161)
  • "Sabbath is an act of resistance. It is a way to stay free and make sure you never get sucked back into slavery, or worse, become the slave driver yourself." (168)
  • "I have enough. What I really need is time to enjoy what I already have, with God." (169)
  • Shabbat is a verb. It's something you do. A practice, a skill you hone." (174)

Chapter 9: Simplicity

Summary: You have to pick who you serve: you cannot serve both God and money.

  • Jean Baudrillard: Materialism has become the dominant system of meaning. Atheism hasn't replaced cultural Christianity, shopping has .(180)
  • 1927 journalist: "The American citizen's first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer." (182)
  • Remember that most advertising is a form of propaganda. Bernays in Propaganda: "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute and invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." (184)
  • "Every single thing you buy costs you not only money but also time. And less time means more hurry. We choose money and stuff over time and freedom. Instead of spending money to get time, we spend time to get money." (190-191)
  • "Jesus' moral teachings are't arbitrary at all. They are statements about how the world actually works." (192)
  • ~Fight Club A Novel (194), and "the things you own end up owning you"
  • You have to pick: No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." (Mt-06)
  • "We worry about what we worship." (197)
  • "Minimalism isn't about living with nothing; it's about living with less. 'Organizing' is antithetical to minimalism. What if you had only what you neede, and there wasn't anything to organize." (199)
  • Definition of minimalism:
    • Joshua Becker: "The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them." (200)
    • Richard Foster and Mark Scandrette: "Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle of choosing to leverage time, money, talents, and possessions toward what matters most." (200)
  • Simplicity: "the goal is to live with a high degree of intentionality around what matters most." (201)
  • "Simplicity is a practice that's entirely based on Jesus' life." (203)
  • Twelve rules for simplicity:
    1. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item? What will this do to the pace of my life?
    2. Before you buy, ask yourself, By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?
    3. Never impulse buy.
    4. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things.
    5. When you can, share.
    6. Get into the habit of giving things away.
    7. Live by a budget. (Free)
    8. Learn to enjoy things without owning them.
    9. Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation.
    10. Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures.
    11. Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie.
    12. Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism.
  • "What would Jesus do if he were me?" (214)
  • "It will cost you to follow Jesus and live his way of simplicity. But it will cost you far more not to." (215)
  • "Right now you have everything you need to live a happy, content life; you have access to the Father." (217)

Chapter 10: Slowing

Summary: We need spiritual disciplines of slowness.

  • We need to adapt the Spiritual Disciplines to our age: "Could it be that we need a few new spiritual disciplines to survive the modern world?" This could perhaps be called "slowing." (221)
  • "If we can slow down both the pace at which we think and the pace at which we move our bodies through the world, maybe we can slow down our souls." (222)
  • Rules for living a slow life:
    1. Drive the speed limit.
    2. Get in the slow lane (driving is a great time to pray).
    3. Come to a full stop at stop signs.
    4. Don't text and drive.
    5. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone.
    6. Get in the longest checkout line. "It's wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want, so that when somebody else denies us from getting what we want we don't respond with anger."
    7. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone. (I turned off text notifications entirely)
    8. Get a flip phone.
    9. Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.
    10. Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time.
    11. Set times for email.
    12. Get off social media.
    13. Kill your TV. "There's very little cinema I can watch that does not incite lust, along with a parade of its ruinous friends."
    14. Single-task.
    15. Walk slower.
    16. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude.
    17. Take up journaling.
    18. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation.
    19. Take long vacations.
    20. Cook your own food. And eat in.
  • ☐ make my 20 rules of "no hurry" list 📅 2024-09-22

Epilogue: A quiet life

  • "If there's a formula for a happy life, it's quite simple—inhabit the moment." (249)
  • "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life." (253, cf. 1 Thes-04)
  • "The fight isn't optional. You must make a decision. So, how will you live?" (255)

Topic: Simplicity

Source

Created: 2024-08-02-Fri
Updated: 2024-09-22-Sun