The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

Dealing with the frantic pace of modern life

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If hurry is an epidemic--and I think it is--then most people I know are infected.

Meetings, appointments, calls, texts, emails, chores--life today can get so filled up that without meaning to, you can find yourself trapped in a perpetual state of hurry. 

"Honey, we're gonna be late."

"What's taking the kids so long? The game starts in 10 minutes."

"Why's that driver going so slow?"

"The boss needs to see you right now."

"If you don't act today, you'll lose the special price."

"Your paper is due by 4:00 today."

"You have eight meetings scheduled this afternoon."

It goes on and on, doesn't it? To the point where many of us feel like a hamster running on a wheel. Whether you’re one of those people who writes out a to-do list first thing every morning and tics off the items one by one or someone who keeps a mental tab in your head and works through items over the course of your day, you feel that you never get to the end of it. When the next day’s needs get added to the leftovers from the previous day, you have to move faster and faster to keep from falling further behind. That’s when you lose any sense of satisfaction with life and instead feel like you’re going in circles—just like that hamster.

Young parents are hit especially hard. For starters, their lives are more frantic because of the demands of starting families and careers. To add to the stress, they often become so focused on keeping up with their peers' houses, cars or lifestyles that they get over their heads in debt—and few things add a sense of frenzy to everyday life like worrying about money. On top of everything else, they spend much of their time ferrying children to sports events, school functions, friend's houses or stores in such a dizzying sequence that they lose track of which child needs to be where or when.

But no season of life is immune from the modern pressure to hurry, and whatever your age, there’s a general sense that there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it.

I knew I was in trouble a few years ago when I started competing with myself every morning by counting the seconds to see how fast I could make coffee so I could get to the office quicker. If I was able to do it in fewer seconds on Tuesday than it took on Monday, I won. That was crazy.

I've been as much a part of this pace of life as everyone else--and just as frustrated. That's why when I ran across John Mark Comer's book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry I dove right in. I'm not going to walk through the book here—you can buy it on Amazon in either print or Kindle versions—but one thing he says really stuck with me (it’s a phrase he picks up from the well known spiritual writer Dallas Willard):

Hurry isn't OF the devil, hurry IS the devil.

Comer isn't making a theological point. He's describing how our modern pace of life subverts many of our Christian values. How can we claim to love our spouse if we don't have enough time to listen carefully to them? What does it really mean to be a parent if we're working so many hours that we're rarely at home with our children and even when we are, our mind is somewhere else? What does it say about our faith when our days are so packed with other things that there's no time for prayer or reading God's Word? If our calendar has no open spaces, where is there room for worship?

At every step of much of modern culture, it's easy to see how hurry is the enemy of our soul. But what can we do? We’re so immersed in a hurry-up culture that trying to change the pace of our lives is like a fish trying to swim upstream. Or, maybe closer to the truth, that same fish jumping out of the water altogether and trying to live on dry land. In other words, slowing down in today’s world requires such a counter-cultural shift that many of us despair of being able to do it.

There are some common-sense strategies that can help. Simple things like eliminating non-essential items from our daily calendar (for Comer, this is where the word “ruthless” comes into play), choosing to walk slow instead of fast, driving the speed limit, and turning the cell phone off on a regular basis.

But those actions only deal with the outer layer. The real problem is harder to come to terms with and can only be dealt with on a deeper, more spiritual problem. As uncomfortable as it is to think about, the fact is that our lives feel hurried because our souls are restless.

Our lives feel hurried because our souls are restless

That’s the truth I tried to convey to a group of school administrators I spoke to last week. Each August before school starts, our church hosts a luncheon for local school administrators as a way of thanking them for their past work and encouraging them as they face the start of a new school year. This year’s luncheon was particularly important because of the stresses of the last couple of years brought on by COVID, stresses that affected school administrators in unique fashion. For the last two years, this group has been on the front lines of a battle that included frightened students, exhausted teachers, angry parents, uncertain supervisors, frightened politicians and unclear health professionals. There weren’t enough hours in each day to deal with all the decisions that had to be made and all the problems that had to be solved. As I prepared to speak, I knew that school administrators understood hurry in a way few others do.

I also knew that throwing a few cliches at them about better time managment and managing stress was silly. How can you manage your time more effeciently when each day is little more than crisis managment? To be honest, the surprising thing to me about these administrators as well as all administrators wasn’t that so many of their colleagues had quit or retired over the last two years but that so many were still working.

So I talked to them instead about their souls, about that interior space within us that makes us uniquely human, that integrates mind, heart and body in a way that gives direction and meaning to life. When we nurture our soul, I said, life becomes frutiful and fulfilling. But when we neglect our soul, we become empty and fearful. Whatever else you do, I said to the school administrators, you must carve out time to tend to your souls because if you don’t, your hectic lives will engulf you.

What’s true for school administrators is true for the rest of us. Each of us must figure out how, with our unique personality and circumstances, we can carve out the time and space to tend to our souls. To the degree we’re able to do that, we’ll be able to escape the tyrrany of hurry in the modern world.

Christian song-writer Will Reagan captures the spiritual principle at stake in the modern world’s culture of hurry in his song, “I’m Not in Hurry”:

I'm not in a hurry
When it comes to Your spirit
When it comes to Your presence
When it comes to Your voice
I'm learning to listen
Just to rest in Your nearness
I'm starting to notice
You are speaking