Transcription
The philosopher Dallas Willard once called hurry the great enemy of spiritual life in our day, and he said, "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." That hurry is really the issue underneath so many of the other issues of our day and age, from outrage culture to these kind of anxiety epidemic across our generation to digital distraction to the breakdown of family to chronic loneliness and the suicide rate and its explosion to exhaustion and burnout and so on and so forth.
Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who coined the phrase of the kind of the paradigm of introvert and extrovert and whose work was the basis for the Myers-Briggs Theory of Personality, once had this great line, or he's saying on a regular basis, "Hurry isn't of the devil. It is the devil." I doubt that most of us hear the moniker of the devil and think of another alert on our phone or Instagram or another hour at the office or another late-night email flurry or another activity at church or just a life of speed.
Corey ten Boom, the Dutch woman who saved so many Jews from the Nazi Holocaust, once said, "If the devil can't make you sin, he'll make you busy." Psychologists now diagnose people with hurry sickness, which people think I'm joking when I talk about that. It's actually a thing. Like, Google it in DSM or whatever, which Psychology Today defines as, "A malaise in which a person feels chronically short of time." Anybody and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.
Now, not to play armchair psychologists, but I'm pretty sure that all of us have hurry sickness. And the ongoing effect of hurry or busyness or distraction or whatever you want to call it on our soul and our society is really starting to take its toll. Just think about it. What do most people say when you ask the customary, you know, "Hey, how's it going?" or "How are you?" or "What's going on?" And most people say something to the effect of, "Oh, I'm good, just busy." Pay attention, and you will hear this across all the lines that we hear so much about in the news, across gender, across class, across ethnicity, across the urban-suburban divide. Everybody is busy. Seriously, everybody.
I talk to college kids, they're busy. Young parents are busy. Single professionals are busy. Working-class people are busy. Empty nesters in the peninsula are busy. And retirees down in Mexico for winter are busy, too. Everybody I talk to is well, everybody in the West. All my African immigrant friends are like, "You Americans, what is wrong with you? You're all so..." They say that to me, "You're all so busy."
The essence of pathological busyness, or if you prefer the moniker of hurry, is we have too much to do. That's that's the shorter. We just have too much to do and not enough time. And so the only way to cram it all in is to speed up our mind and our body and our relationships and our interactions with other people to this frenetic pace that I would argue is incompatible with life in the kingdom of God. I would argue you can't live in the kingdom of God at that pace of life, nor were you designed to.
And this has all sorts of implications, both for our emotional health and for our spiritual life. Anglican priest W.F. Adams, who was C.S. Lewis's spiritual director for many years, once called hurry the death of prayer. He said, "To walk with Jesus is to walk at a slow, unhurried pace." So that in the 1940s, this is no surprise that Paul's in Paul's definition of love to the Corinthians, the first descriptor on his list is, "Love is patient." Another way to translate that is, "Love is unhurried."
And her uh hurry, it just it oxidizes our capacity for love. And within our capacity for compassion, compassion is a feeling word. To have compassion, it demands that we slow down long enough to feel what another person is feeling in a kind of solidarity, to see the world from their perspective, even if we disagree, to sit with them in that place. I love Willard's line, the ruthless elimination of her. There's you have to be a little bit ruthless in the day and age of the smartphone and Wi-Fi and attention economy and the city and noise and transience and busyness and all of the things. This won't just happen to you.
Orenberg was kind enough to write the forward for my book, and he had this great line, and it's my favorite line, actually, in the whole book because he wrote it. And um, he said, "To choose to live an unhurried life in our day is somewhat like taking a vow of poverty in earlier centuries. It's scary, and it's an act of faith, but there are deeper riches on the other side."
And I'm not here to say I have it all down and follow me around and I'm never in a hurry and I just walk in Jesus' Zen love all of the time. That's not true. But I am here to say I've made some major sacrifices in my life, or they felt like it at the time, and everyone was worth it, times ten. There are deeper riches on the other side. I want that for me. I want that for my family, for the people that I do life with, and I want it for you.