Un-Hurry Week 1
Un-Hurry Week 1:
What is our Greatest Enemy?
Thought of the Week:
Corrie Ten Boom: If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.
Thomas Merton: The rush and pressure of modern life is a pervasive form of contemporay violence
Hurry kills: It kils relationships, joy, and gratitude. It robs us of our delight and our ability to be present. It inhibits the growth of wisdom and our ability to concentrate. It destroys our attention and awareness, which are both integral to ur formation as believers who walk with Jesus.
Dr. Meyer Friedman – the cardiologist who rose to fame for theorizing that type A people who are chronically angry and in a hurry are more prone to heart attacks – coined the term “hurry sickness” after noticing that most of his at-risk cardiovascular patients displayed a harrying sense of time urgency. Psychologists and mental health professionals today now consider this an epidemic – as in, they label it a disease. Friedman defined “hurry sickness” as thus:
“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.”
So… How do you know if you might have a case of hurry sickness?
In his book: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer offers a little self-inventory with ten symptoms of hurry sickness. Read these and see if any of them ring true for your life in this season:
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Irritability: You get mad, frustrated, or just annoyed way too easily. Little, normal things irk you. People have to tiptoe around your ongoing low-grade negativity, if not anger. Word of advice from a fellow eggshell expert: to self-diagnose don’t look at how you treat a colleague or neighbor; look at how you treat those closest to you: your spouse, children, roommate, etc.
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Hypersensitivity: All it takes is a minor comment to hurt your feelings, a grumpy email to set you off, or a little turn of events to throw you into an emotional funk and ruin your day. Minor things quickly escalate to major emotional events. Depending on your personality, this might show up as anger or nitpicky-ness or anxiety or depression or just tiredness. Point is, the ordinary problems of life this side of Eden have a disproportionate effect on your emotional well-being and relational grace. You can’t seem to roll with the punches.
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Restlessness: When you actually do try to slow down and rest, you can’t relax. You give Sabbath a try, and you hate it. You read Scripture but find it boring. You have quiet time with God but can’t focus your mind. You go to bed early but toss and turn with anxiety. You watch TV but simultaneously check your phone, fold laundry, and get into a spat over social media or email. Your mind and body are hyped up on the drug of speed, and when they don’t get the next dopamine fix, they shiver.
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Workaholism (or just nonstop activity): You just don’t know when to stop. Or worse, you can’t stop. Another hour, another day, another week. Your drugs of choice are accomplishment and accumulation. These could show up as careerism or just as obsessive housecleaning and errand running. Result: you fall prey to “sunset fatigue,” where by day’s end you have nothing left to give to your spouse, children, or loved ones. They get the grouchy, curt, overtired you, and it’s not pretty.
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Emotional numbness: You just don’t have the capacity to feel another’s pain. Or your own pain for that matter. Empathy is a rare feeling for you. You just don’t have time for it. You live in this kind of constant fatigue.
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Out-of-order priorities: You feel disconnected from your identity and calling. You’re always getting sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. Your life is reactive, not proactive. You’re busier than ever before yet still feel like you don’t have time for what really matters to you. Months often go by or years—or God forbid, maybe its even decades – and you realize you still haven’t gotten around to all the things you said were the most important in your life.
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Lack of care for your body: You don’t have time for the basics: eight hours of sleep a night; daily exercise; healthy, home-cooked food; minimal stimulants; margin. You gain weight. Get sick multiple times a year. Regularly wake up tired. Don’t sleep well. Love off the four horseman of the industrialized food apocalypse: caffeine, sugar, processed carbs, and alcohol.
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Escapist behaviors: When we’re too tired to do what’s actually life-giving for our souls, we each turn to our distraction of choice: overeating, overdrinking, binge-watching Netflix, browsing social media, surfing the web, looking at porn – name your preferred cultural narcotic. Narcotics are good, healthy even, on an occasional and short-term basis when they shield us from unnecessary pain; but when we abuse them to escape reality, they eat us alive. You find yourself stuck in the negative feedback loop of socially acceptable addictions.
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Slippage of spiritual disciplines: If you’re anything like me, when you get overbusy, the things that are truly life-giving for your soul are the first to go rather than your first go-to – such as a quiet time in the morning, Scripture, prayer, Sabbath, worship on Sunday, a meal with your community, and so on. Because in an ironic catch-22, the things that make for rest actually take a bit of emotional energy and self-discipline. When we get overbusy, we get overtired, and when we get overtired, we don’t have the energy or discipline to do what we need most for our souls. Repeat. The cycle begins to feed off its own energy. So instead of life with God, we settle for life with a Netflix subscription and a glass of cheap red wine. A very poor substitute. Not because time wasted on TV is the great Satan but because we rarely get done binge-watching anything (or posting to social media, or overeating Five Guys burgers and fries, etc.) and feel awake and alive from the soul outward, rested, refreshed, and ready for a new day. We delay the inevitable: an emotional crash. And as a consequence, we miss out on the life-giving sense of the with-ness of God.
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Isolation: You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul. On those rare times when you actually stop to pray (and by pray I don’t mean ask God for stuff; I mean sit with God in the quiet), you’re so stressed and distracted that your mind can’t settle down long enough to enjoy the Father’s company. Same with your friends: when you’re with them, you’re also with your phone or a million miles away in your mind, running down the to-do list. And even when you’re alone, you come face to face with the void that is your soul immediately run back to the familiar groove of busyness and digital distraction.
Scripture for week 1: Matthew 11:28-30 NRSV
28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Questions:
- What burdens are you carrying that you want to give to Jesus?
- When we follow Jesus and practice the way of Jesus we expereince life and the ease of burdens. How has then been true for you? What stops this from being true for you?
- What about your relationship with God and your journey of faith do you most long to change or grow?