Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry

Not long after moving back to Colorado Springs Colorado, I called on a wise friend to ask for some spiritual direction. I described the pace of life in my current ministry. The church where I serve tends to move at a fast clip. I also told him about my rhythms of life: driving, baseball-league, music-lessons, bible school, counseling, ministry moving pace of life. I told him about the present condition of my heart, as best I could discern it. What did I need to do, I asked him, to be spiritually healthy?

Long pause.

"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," he said at last.

Another long pause.

"Okay, I've written that one down," I told him, a little impatiently. "That's a good one. Now what else is there?" I had many things to do, and this time together needed to move on, so I was anxious to cram as many units of spiritual wisdom into the least amount of time possible.

Another long pause.

"There is nothing else," he said. "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life."

I've concluded that my life and the well-being of the people I serve depends on following his prescription, for hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry destroys souls. As Carl Jung wrote, "Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil."

For most 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.

One of the great illusions of our day is that hurrying will buy us more time. I pulled into a service station recently where the advertising slogan read, "We help you move faster." But what if my primary need is not moving faster?

Time magazine noted that back in the 1960s, expert testimony was given to a sub-committee of the Senate on time management. The gist was that due to advances in technology, within 20 years or so people would have to cut back radically on how many hours a week they worked (or how many weeks a year they worked), or they'd have to start retiring sooner. The great challenge, they said, would be figuring out what to do with all the excess time.

Yet 50 years later, not many of us would say this is our primary time challenge. In fact, quite the reverse. Robert Banks, author of All the Business of Life, notes that while our society is rich in things, we are extremely poor in time. In fact, never before in human history has a society been so things-rich and so time-poor.

Our world has become the world of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

Meyer Friedman (who with Diane Ulmer wrote Treating Type A Behavior -- and Your Heart) defines hurry sickness as "above all, a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time, frequently in the face of opposition, real or imagined, from other persons."

Though our age intensifies "hurry sickness," it's not a new problem; people in ministry have been subject to it at least since the days of Jesus. During one hectic season of ministry, Mark notes of the disciples, "For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat."

Far too many people involved in ministry think of this as a life verse, as if God will reward the hectic one-day with, "What a life you had! Many were coming and going, and you had no leisure even to eat. Well done!"

Not quite. Jesus was aware of this problem, and he constantly withdrew from crowds and activities. He taught the same to his followers. In one instance, when they returned from a busy time of ministry, filled with adrenaline, he told them, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while."

The question becomes “was Jesus ever in a hurry about anything He ever did?”

If you want to follow someone, you can't go faster than the one who is leading; following Jesus cannot be done at a sprint. Jesus was often busy but he was never hurried. Being busy is an outer condition; being hurried is a sickness of the soul.

Jesus never went about the busyness of his ministry in a way that severed the life-giving connection between himself and his Father.

In Jesus' main parable about the sower and seed He shows us the principals of farming. The three main principals are seed, time, and harvest. Time is a principal that we cannot bypass or cram for. You cannot hurry the growing process along, it must be done in its time. You can't hurry God up, but you can slow Him down by not participating in the rhythms of His time. How fast did Jesus move?

Just think if God came along and said that you have only three and a half years to complete your life and then I will take you home to heaven. You would try to cram a whole life time of living and ministering in that short time. Jesus had only three and a half years to complete all of the ministry to benefit the whole world. Jesus still was not in a hurry about doing all that He needed to accomplish.

He never did anything in a way that interfered with his ability to give love when that was what was called for. Laying down laws does not take any time at all, but to love, that takes time. Laws take the place of loving, that is why we put them in place so we can speed the process up. Jesus observed a regular rhythm of withdrawal from activity, for solitude and prayer. He never was in a hurry, ever.

Jesus ruthlessly eliminated hurry from his life, and He always had time to love.

Psalms 46:10 Be Still and know that He is God.