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What if life didn’t have to feel so rushed, chaotic, and out of control?
In The Relentless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer doesn’t just write a book—he invites you into a heartfelt conversation. Picture a fireside chat, a stroll through the city, or a quiet moment in your favorite coffee shop. That’s the tone as he shares his personal journey of learning to follow Jesus while navigating the relentless chaos of modern life.
Comer wrestles with a powerful question: What would Jesus do if He were living my life in today’s fast-paced, distracted world? His discoveries are refreshingly simple: embrace silence and solitude, practice Sabbath, choose simplicity, and—most importantly—slow down.
It’s not about adding more to your already full plate; it’s about reclaiming your soul. Ready to find peace in the midst of the noise?
Discover how in The Relentless Elimination of Hurry.
See my Kindle highlights below.
Notebook for
Citation (APA): Comer, J. M. (2019). The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Prologue: Autobiography of an epidemic
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a haunting observation of most people in the Western world: “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”5
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Jesus remains the most brilliant, most insightful, most thought-provoking teacher to ever walk the earth. And he walked slowly (more on that in a bit). So rather than buckle up, settle in.
Part one: The problem
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“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
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Then he asks, “Okay, what else?” Another long silence… Willard: “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
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Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.
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The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.
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“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
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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.
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Hurry and love are incompatible. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day. I ooze anger, tension, a critical nagging—the antitheses of love.
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if there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment.
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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.
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“I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”
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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
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We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.
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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.
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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
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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
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The need of the hour is for a slowdown spirituality.16
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just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off) “will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.”
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Translation: they make us dumber.
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right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction. Because that’s where the money is.
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A company can get your money if, and only if, they can get your attention.
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It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.21
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nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.27
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Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things…. Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.28
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What is all this distraction, addiction, and pace of life doing to our souls?
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They are waiting “for their souls to catch up with their bodies.”
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hurry is a form of violence on the soul.
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Here are my ten symptoms of hurry sickness.
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Irritability—
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Little, normal things irk you.
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Hypersensitivity—
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the ordinary problems of life this side of Eden have a disproportionate effect on your emotional well-being and relational grace.
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Restlessness—
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Workaholism
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Emotional numbness—
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Out-of-order priorities—
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sucked into the tyranny of the urgent,
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Your life is reactive, not proactive.
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Lack of care for your body—
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Escapist behaviors—
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Slippage of spiritual disciplines—
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Isolation—
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The point I’m driving toward is this: an overbusy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it’s toxic.
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Thomas Merton once called “the rush and pressure of modern life” a “pervasive form of contemporary violence.”
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Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
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Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.
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“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”11
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Many have noted that the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.
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Usually we interpret treasure to mean our two basic resources: time and money. But an even more precious resource is attention. Without it our spiritual lives are stillborn in the womb.
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attention leads to awareness.
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what you give your attention to is the person you become.
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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.
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“Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”13
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William Irvine called “misliving.” In his book A Guide to the Good Life, he wrote:
Part two: The solution
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here’s the thing—and please listen carefully—the solution is not more time.
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To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential.
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We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers.
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Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite.
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Potential and limitations.
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What you hear very little of—inside or outside the church—is accepting your limitations.
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we can be in only one place at a time.
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We can only “know in part,”6
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we don’t know what we don’t know.
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I will simply never have the intelligence of many of the people I most look up to.
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I will simply never have the giftings of many of the people I most look up to.
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We have only so much capacity.
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Our families of origin.
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Our socioeconomic origins.
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Our seasons of life and their responsibilities—
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life is fleeting.
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there are limits to God’s call on each of us.
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Jesus had to lovingly reprimand Peter: “What is that to you? You must follow me.”9
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Many of us need to hear those same words and find freedom in them.
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What if these limitations aren’t something to fight but to gratefully accept as a signpost to God’s call on our souls?
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I love Peter Scazzero’s line: “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”10
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Jesus’ agenda is to make wounded people whole.
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the main limitation we all share—
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We have to learn to say no. Constantly.
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In the language of Henry David Thoreau, we have to “live deliberately.”
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most of us waste copious amounts of time.
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how we spend our time is how we spend our lives.
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The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.16
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Every day is a chance. Every hour an opportunity. Every moment a precious gift.
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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? Well, the answer, of course, is easy: follow Jesus.
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Jesus had two things. First, he had a yoke. Not a literal yoke; he was a teacher, not a farmer. A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah.
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it was his set of teachings on how to be human.
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His way to shoulder the (at times crippling) weight of life—marriage, divorce, prayer, money, sex, conflict resolution, government—all of it.
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What made Jesus unique wasn’t that he had a yoke; all rabbis had a yoke. It was that he had an easy yoke.
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Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
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The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus.
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Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
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the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as [Jesus] lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style….
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If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
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If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
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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.
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the Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle.
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lifestyle is where the money is.
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As long as we’re riffing on Eugene Peterson, he once wrote this about Jesus’ metaphor of the way: The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life…. But Jesus as the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor.7
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by lifestyle I mean the rhythms and routines that make up your day-to-day existence. The way you organize your time. Spend your money.
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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.
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There is an emotional and even spiritual weight to life; we all feel it, especially as we age. An easy life is a myth,
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Jesus
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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.
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An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.9
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Jesus was rarely in a hurry.
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This rootedness in the moment and connectedness to God, other people, and himself weren’t the by-products of a laid-back personality or pre–Wi-Fi world; they were the outgrowths of a way of life.
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Jesus made sure to inject a healthy dose of margin into his life.
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Jesus’ weekly schedule was a prophetic act against the hurried rhythms of our world.
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Note his practice of simplicity, before it was cool, just the clothes on his back.
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he lived “freely and lightly.”5
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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.
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What does it mean to follow Jesus (or, as I prefer, apprentice under Jesus)? It’s very simple. It means you live the way Jesus lived. You take his life and teachings as your template, your model, your pattern.
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the central question of our apprenticeship to Jesus is pretty straightforward: How would Jesus live if he were me?
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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.
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What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding.
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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.
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It’s a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God, to work and rest and play and eat and drink and hang out with your friends and run errands and catch up on the news, all out of a place of deep, loving enjoyment of the Father’s company.
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make it onto your schedule and into your practices or it will simply never happen.
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The hard truth is that following Jesus is something you do.
Intermission: Wait, what are the spiritual disciplines again?
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you don’t just look at what he or she said or did; you look at how he or she lived the details of day-to-day life.
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spiritual disciplines are actually all habits of your mind and your body.
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“practices of Jesus.”
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these habits, practices, or spiritual disciplines are how we follow Jesus. How we adopt his lifestyle.
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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.
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A discipline is a way to access power.
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A spiritual discipline is similar but different. It’s similar in that it’s “any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.”
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you are also opening yourself up to a power far beyond your own—that of the Holy Spirit.
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for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
Part three: Four practices for unhurrying your life
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A survey from Microsoft found that 77 percent of young adults answered “‘yes’ when asked, ‘When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone.’”1
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I allow myself that brief rant just to say that all this has profound implications for our apprenticeships to Jesus and our experiences (or lack of experiences) of the life he has on offer. How so? Simple: this new normal of hurried digital distraction is robbing us of the ability to be present.
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Present to God.
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Present to other people.
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Present to all that is good, beautiful, and true in our world.
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Even present to our own souls.
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This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness.
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The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God, drowning out the one input we most need.
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Is there a practice from the way of Jesus that could help with this?
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Yes. Absolutely.
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silence and solitude.
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the first thing Jesus did after his baptism was head straight into the desert.
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The wilderness isn’t the place of weakness; it’s the place of strength.
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To clarify, Jesus went to the quiet place for a month and a half. Came back to Capernaum for one day of busy activity. Then he headed straight back to the eremos to pray.
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the quiet place wasn’t a onetime thing.
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Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”7
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And what did Jesus say? Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.9 That’s Jesus for no.
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Notice, Jesus came out of the wilderness with all sorts of clarity about his identity and calling.
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as the Gospels go on, you quickly realize the quiet place was top priority for Jesus.
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There are times when what you really need is time alone with Jesus, but, well, life happens. People happen.
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In Luke, Jesus went to his quiet place no less than nine times.
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Jesus “often withdrew.” He frequently got away. He made a point to sneak off to pray on a regular basis. It was a common habit in his repertoire.
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In Luke’s gospel in particular, you can chart Jesus’ life along two axis points: the busier and more in demand and famous Jesus became, and the more he withdrew to his quiet place to pray.
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Usually for us it’s the exact opposite. When we get overbusy and life is hectic and people are vying for our time, the quiet place is the first thing to go rather than our first go to.
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There are two dimensions of silence—external and internal.
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External silence is pretty self-explanatory: no noise.
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Quiet is a spiritual discipline in and of itself. A millennium and a half ago, the African theologian Saint Augustine said entering silence is “entering into joy.”16
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“The friend of silence draws near to God.”17
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could it be that we’re using external noise to drown out internal noise?
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External noise is easy to quiet.
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But internal noise? That’s a whole other animal. A wild beast in desperate need of taming. There’s no off switch.
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The kind of silence I’m talking about is when you silence both.
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solitude.
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by solitude I don’t mean isolation. The two are worlds apart.
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Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape.
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In his masterpiece Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster wrote, “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”19
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In solitude we’re anything but alone. In fact, that’s where many of us feel most in connection to God.
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Could the antidote for this spiritual malaise be as “easy” as silence and solitude?
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the problem is more our absence than his, more about our distraction than his disconnection,20
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Henri Nouwen said it bluntly, yet eloquently: Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life…. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.21
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if you don’t set aside time to be alone with God, your relationship will wither on the vine.
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Nouwen once asked Mother Teresa for spiritual direction;
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You know what she said? Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong…you will be fine!22
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When we don’t practice this Jesus soul habit, we reap the consequences:
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We feel distant from God and end up living off somebody else’s spirituality,
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We feel distant from ourselves. We lose sight of our identities and callings. We get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important.
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We feel an undercurrent of anxiety that rarely, if ever, goes away.
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always behind,
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always playing catch up, never done.
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Then we get exhausted.
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Then we turn to our escapes of choice.
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We become easy prey for the tempter.
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Then emotional unhealth sets in.
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These are the signs and symptoms of a life without silence and solitude.
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here’s the alternative:
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We find our quiet places—
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We take our time.
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We slow down.
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We start to feel.
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We face the good, the bad, and the ugly in our own hearts.
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In our ears we sense his voice cut through the cacophony of all the other voices,
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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….
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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.26
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And yet: it’s so easy that you just take a little time each day to be alone in the quiet with yourself and God.
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it’s more resting than working, more about not doing than doing,
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it makes the rest of life even easier.
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Desire is a great motivator. It’s the engine of our lives; its function is to propel us out of bed and out into the world.
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desire is one of those things that is never, ever satisfied.
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The eye is not satisfied with seeing.1
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A more recent poet simply said: I can’t get no satisfaction.2
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In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.3
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That feeling is the human condition.
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We live with chronically unsatisfied desires.
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we always want more.
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The question for us as apprentices of Jesus, or really as humans, is simple: What do we do with all this pent-up, unsatisfied desire? This restlessness?
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Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires.
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Is there a practice from the life and teachings of Jesus to mitigate against the chronic restlessness of our condition and culture and to tap into Jesus’ rest for our souls? You already know the answer: heck yes. Many, but at the top of the list is Sabbath.
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The word Sabbath comes to us from the Hebrew Shabbat. The word literally means “to stop.”
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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.
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Human nature and the digital age form a foreboding alliance against a spirit of restfulness.
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say no to a list of good things so you can say yes to the best.
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It’s how we practice, how we prepare our minds and bodies for the moments that matter most.
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Walter Brueggemann has this great line: “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.”8
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A. J. Swoboda wrote this: [The Sabbath] has largely been forgotten by the church, which has uncritically mimicked the rhythms of the industrial and success-obsessed West. The result? Our road-weary, exhausted churches have largely failed to integrate Sabbath into their lives as vital elements of Christian discipleship. It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore.
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there is zero correlation between hurry and productivity.
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Sabbath is coming for you, whether as delight or discipline.
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apparently there’s something about the human condition that makes us want to hurry our way through life as fast as we possibly can, to rebel against the limitations of time itself.
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Ten Commandments,
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one command was longer than all the rest. Way longer. If you were to configure the Ten Commandments as a pie chart, this one would take up over 30 percent of the pie. And what was the command? Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.22
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the Sabbath isn’t the same thing as a day off.
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On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship.
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“Rest” and “worship” are broad categories. Plenty of room for interpretation
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The important thing is to set aside a day for nothing but rest and worship.
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The Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments with a “why” behind it.
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for Sabbath, God goes back to the Genesis story,
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the Sabbath is the only “spiritual discipline” that makes it into the Ten Commandments.
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We live in a culture of more. A culture of gaping, unquenchable lust. For everything. Lust for more food, more drink, more clothes, more devices, more apps, more things, more square footage, more experiences, more stamps on the passport—more.
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Sabbath, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann so famously said, is “an act of resistance.”33 It’s an act of rebellion against Pharaoh and his empire. An insurgency and insurrection against the “isms” of the Western world—globalism, capitalism, materialism, all of which sound nice but quickly make slaves of the rich and the poor. Sabbath is a way to stay free and make sure you never get sucked back into slavery or, worse, become the slave driver yourself.
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accomplishment and accumulation aren’t evil in and of themselves, as long as they don’t take advantage of the poor (which usually they do…). But there’s a limit. At some point you have to draw a line in the sand
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The Sabbath is like a guerrilla warfare tactic. If you want to break free from the oppressive yoke of Egypt’s taskmaster and its restless, relentless lust for more, just take a day each week and stick it to the man. Don’t buy. Don’t sell. Don’t shop. Don’t surf the web.
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Just put all that away and enjoy.
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Above all, slow down long enough to enjoy life with God, who offers everything that materialism promises but can never deliver on—namely, contentment.
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The Sabbath is like a governor on the speed of life.
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On the Sabbath, we slow down; more than that, we come to a full stop.
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One of the surprising things I learned when I began to practice Sabbath is that to really enjoy the seventh day, you have to slow down the other six days.
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As Brueggemann said so eloquently: People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.37
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I deeply enjoy the practice of Sabbath. For me it’s not a legalistic hangover from some fundamentalist shtick but a practice from the way of Jesus, a delivery system for life.
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If your story is anything like mine, Sabbath will take you a little while to master. After all, Shabbat is a verb. It’s something you do. A practice, a skill you hone. It took years of trial and error for me. As our kids age into their teens, our practice continues to adapt and iterate.
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it might take you a while to dial it in. That’s okay.
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Remember, you’re not in a hurry.
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And I find that my ordinary life is enough.
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when I turn my phone back on and reenter the modern world, I do so slowly. And, wow, does that ever feel good.
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The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has made the point that in the Western world, materialism has become the new, dominant system of meaning.7 He argues atheism hasn’t replaced cultural Christianity; shopping has.
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We now get our meaning in life from what we consume.
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Shopping is now the number one leisure activity in America, usurping the place previously held by religion.
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We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.9
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our “consumer” economy is now built around people spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need.
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it’s easy to forget that most advertising is a form of propaganda, one that plays not to our pre-frontal cortex but to a deeper, less logical part of us.
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We are far more emotionally tricked and desire driven than we care to admit.
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advertising is propaganda.
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Mark Twain perceptively noted, “Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”17
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the problem isn’t stuff. It’s that (1) we put no limit on stuff due to our insatiable human desire for more. And (2) we think we need all sorts of things to be happy when, in actuality, we need very few.
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The propaganda machine is working like a charm. Most of us believe the lie: more money and more stuff equal more happiness.
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No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.
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The truth? Poverty is really hard and a middle-class life is a real gift, but after that it’s the law of diminishing returns.
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the verdict is in: time is telling the catastrophic damage that materialism is doing to the soul of our society.
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One of the many reasons that happiness is dropping in the West even as the Dow is rising is because materialism has sped up our society to a frenetic, untenable pace.
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The drive to possess is an engine for hurry.24
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Every single thing you buy costs you not only money but also time.
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you’re paying for that experience not only in cash but also in time.
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And less time means more hurry.
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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. Cue the splinters.
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his ideas about money and stuff correspond to reality.
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I can still remember the afternoon where it hit me like a freight train: Jesus was right.
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Tyler Durden’s advice: “Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
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What if the formula “more stuff equals more happiness” is bad math?
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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.
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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.
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What if I were to reject my culture’s messaging as a half-truth at best, if not a full-on lie,
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You cannot serve God and the system.34 You simply can’t live the freedom way of Jesus and get sucked into the overconsumption that is normal in our society. The two are mutually exclusive. You have to pick.
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“Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle”38 of “choosing to leverage time, money, talents and possessions toward what matters most.”39
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As Saint Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, once said, “In everything, love simplicity.”41
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The goal here is to live with a high degree of intentionality around what matters most, which, for those of us who apprentice under Jesus, is Jesus himself and his kingdom.
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Jesus clearly sided with minimalism over materialism.
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As Richard Foster noted, “a carefree unconcern for possessions” is what “marks life in the kingdom.”50
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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.
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small, creative practices to live out his heady ideas about the kingdom of God.51
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principles, not rules;
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Here are my top twelve.
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1. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item?
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measure hurry. What will this do to the pace of my life? Speed it up or slow it down?
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2. Before you buy, ask yourself, By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?
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3. Never impulse buy.
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You’ll be shocked at how good it feels to not buy something.
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4. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things.
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“Buy it once” is a great motto to live by.
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always ask yourself, Do I actually need this?
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The English designer William Morris offered a good rule of thumb: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”54
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the apprentice of Jesus is regularly found asking, “How can I live with less?”
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5. When you can, share.
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As one early church father said, “We hold everything in common except our wives.”55
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6. Get into the habit of giving things away.
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Less shopping means more money to share,
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7. Live by a budget.
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8. Learn to enjoy things without owning them.
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9. Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation.
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10. Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures.
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The older I get, the more I enjoy the simple things—a cup of coffee or tea in the morning,
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These experiences usually cost very little, yet they pay huge dividends of happiness.
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Every evening stroll, every sunrise, every good conversation with an old friend
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the teacher in Ecclesiastes, at the height of his ostentatious wealth, said, “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.”57
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It’s the little things, ya know?
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11. Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie.
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“Refuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry.”58
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12. Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism.
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We often hear, “Less, but better.” But what if less is better?
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Here’s a good place to start simplifying: your closet.
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A more helpful question is, What would Jesus do if he were me?
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To follow Jesus is to ask that question until our last breath.
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simplicity isn’t “the answer” to the hurry of our modern world.
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But it is an answer.
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Just get rid of the crap you don’t need. But it’s not a cheap answer. Ironically, it will cost you.
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As Dallas Willard so astutely pointed out, the cost of discipleship is high, but the cost of non-discipleship is even higher.60
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Contentment isn’t some Buddhist-like negation of all desire; it’s living in such a way that your unfulfilled desires no longer curb your happiness.
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We all live with unfulfilled desires. In this life all our symphonies remain unfinished. But this doesn’t mean we can’t live happy.
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Again, the truism: we achieve inner peace when our schedules are aligned with our values.
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Could it be that we need a few new spiritual disciplines to survive the modern world? Counterhabits to wage war against what the futurist David Zach called “hyperliving—skimming along the surface of life”3
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the spiritual discipline of “slowing.”4
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here are twenty ideas for slowing down your overall pace of life.
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1. Drive the speed limit.
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2. Get into the slow lane.
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3. Come to a full stop at stop signs.
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4. Don’t text and drive.
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5. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone.
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6. Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store.
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7. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone.
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8. Get a flip phone. Or ditch your cell phone all together.
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9. Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.
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10. Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time.
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11. Set times for email.
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12. Set a time and a time limit for social media (or just get off it).
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13. Kill your TV.
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what we give our attention to is the person we become,
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I’ve come to realize the obvious: multitasking is a myth. Literally.
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I inhabit a body. A body that can do only one…thing…at…a…time.
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Multitasking is just sleight of hand for switching back and forth between a lot of different tasks so I can do them all poorly instead of doing one well.
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this from the legendary Walter Brueggemann: Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.14
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15. Walk slower.
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one of the best ways to slow down your overall pace of life is to literally slow down your body. Force yourself to move through the world at a relaxed pace.
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16. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude.
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17. Take up journaling.
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The point is to slow down long enough to observe your life from the outside.
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18. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation.
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I can’t put into words what meditation does for my soul. Tim Keller, however, can:
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Persons who meditate become 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.17 In a cultural moment of shallow, mindfulness and meditation are a step toward the deep waters.
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19. If you can, take long vacations.
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20. Cook your own food. And eat in.
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These are just ideas. They might not be for you. That’s cool. Come up with your own list. But come up with a list. Then do it.
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There’s more to life than an increase in speed. Life is right under our noses, waiting to be enjoyed.
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I’ve reorganized my life around three very simple goals: Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.
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These four practices—silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing—have helped me tremendously to move toward abiding as my baseline. But to say it yet again, all four of them are a means to an end.
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it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment.
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the goal is practice, not perfection.
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Frank Laubach, who self-identified as a “modern mystic,” so beautifully said, “Every now is an eternity if it is full of God.”3
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All the best stuff is in the present, the now.
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if there’s a formula for a happy life, it’s quite simple – inhabit the moment.
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When you err, just begin again.
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Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.
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one line in particular kept coming back to haunt me.
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Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.10
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Paul’s line reminds me of the long-standing advice of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order): Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet.11
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this easy yoke to carry a hard life is something we have to fight for. Ugh, you’re thinking. I don’t want a fight; I want a vacation. But the hard reality is the fight isn’t optional.
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Here’s to the easy yoke.
