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

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I’ve already started slowing down a bit after reading this book and it’s my goal to keep slowing down more and more so that I can cultivate the love and peace and joy of Christ in my heart.

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. The Hebrew word Shabbat means ‘to stop.’ But it can also be translated ‘to delight.’ It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.” What if you had only what you needed, and there wasn’t anything to organize? There’s an idea worth chasing down. We hear the refrain “I’m great, just busy” so often we assume pathological busyness is okay. After all, everybody else is busy too. But what if busyness isn’t healthy? What if it’s an airborne contagion, wreaking havoc on our collective soul?” There are those rare books that every single waking person needs to immediately go read. This is that book. We’ve found no better conversation or a more much-needed antidote to our culture’s problem of busyness and hurry than John Mark’s words in this book. Beyond helpful and encouraging and insightful to us!” —Alyssa and Jefferson Bethke,New York Timesbest-selling authors of Jesus > Religionand Love That Lasts

Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.” Comer is a voracious reader and I love that he embellishes his own thoughts with those of many who've both gone before him or doing life presently. We share many of the same 'literary' heroes but he's also introduced me to a number of his that I was less familiar with. Too much stuff in too small a space,…anything that we no longer used or loved, and…anything that led to a feeling of disorganization. Jesus’ teachings on wealth run counter to American society, where achievement and accumulation are the way to happiness. To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals:

The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them.What if the secret to a happy life—and it is a secret, an open one but a secret nonetheless; how else do so few people know it?—what if the secret isn’t “out there” but much closer to home? What if all you had to do was slow down long enough for the merry-go-round blur of life to come into focus? I don’t know your story. The odds are, you aren’t a former megachurch pastor who burned out and had a mid-life crisis at thirty-three. It’s more likely you’re a college student at USD or a twentysomething urbanite in Chicago or a full-time mom in Melbourne or a middle-aged insurance broker in Minnesota. Getting started in life or just trying to keep going. of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer In a way, I’m the worst person to write about hurry. I’m the guy angling at the stoplight for the lane with two cars instead of three; the guy bragging about being the “first to the office, last to go home”; the fast-walking, fast-talking, chronic-multitasking speed addict (to clarify, not that kind of speed addict). Or at least I was. Not anymore. I found an off-ramp from that life. So maybe I’m the best person to write a book on hurry? You decide. But resting and worship--anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.

A century ago the less you worked, the more status you had. Now it’s flipped: the more you sit around and relax, the less status you have. The irony of this book though, is there was enough fluff in it that I was inclined to skim a good amount - which felt an awful lot like hurrying through a book about not hurrying.Fantastic book. JMC gives an apt snapshot of the landscape of our current cultural moment, and the unique troubles that besiege it, and provides 4 crucial Practices from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as ways to 'stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive' in this context. 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.