250 Best The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry Quotes: John Mark Comer

1. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation

2. “A yoke is a work instrument. Thus when Jesus offers a yoke he offers what we might think tired workers need least. They need a mattress or a vacation, not a yoke. I”

3. Come to a full stop at stop signs.

4. Our education and careers

5. “Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943).”

6. “The hurried life leads to the hollow life.” – Unknown

7. “What you give your attention to is the person you become.”

8. “Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things. Every technology from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program and agenda and philosophy that may or may not be life enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.” – Neil Postman [It is wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology.]

9. “Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.21”

10. “In reality Jesus’ moral teachings aren’t arbitrary at all. They are laws, yes. But moral laws are no different from scientific laws like E = mc2 or gravity.26 They are statements about how the world actually works. And if you ignore them, not only do you rupture relationship with God, but you also go against the grain of the universe he created.”

11. “At this point in my life, I’m just trying to not miss the goodness of each day, and bring my best self to it.”

12. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die discover that I had not lived.” – Henry David Thoreau

13. Our giftings. On a similar note as above, I will simply never have the giftings of many of the people I most look up to. Comparison just eats away at our joy, doesn’t it?

14. “Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.”

15. “Simplify your life and eliminate hurry, for true peace and fulfillment can only be found in stillness.” – Unknown

16. “Take a step back and breathe. Life is too precious to be rushed through.” – Unknown

17. Our personalities and emotional wiring. We have only so much capacity. I’m an introvert. I’m actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small. I’m also melancholy by nature. I hate to admit it, but some people have a lot more capacity than I do

18. “Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.” “A successful life has become a violent enterprise.” – Wayne Muller

19. Set times for email. Remember: the more email you do, the more email you do

20. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” (-Paul) Not loud, not important, or impactful.

21. 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

22. “Relentlessness”

23. Set a time and a time limit for social media (or just get off it).

24. Drive the speed limit.

25. “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.”

26. “Because where you put your resources is where you put your heart. It’s the steering wheel to your engine of desire.”

27. “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?”

28. “And hurry is a form of violence on the soul.”

29. Workaholism (or just nonstop activity)—You just don’t know when to stop. Or worse, you can’t stop

30. “And mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It’s the same thing, just missing the best part—Jesus.”

31. “Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness…. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion….”

32. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude. I take a full day once a month to be alone

33. “Es cierto que existe un tipo de ocupación que es saludable, en donde tu vida está llena de cosas que realmente importan, de tal modo que no desperdicias tiempo en placeres vacíos o actividades triviales. Teniendo en cuenta esta definición, el mismo Jesús estaba ocupado. El problema no es que tengas muchas cosas que hacer, sino que tengas demasiadas y que, por ende, la única forma de cumplir con tus obligaciones sea marchar a toda máquina.”

34. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone.

35. “It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment. It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm. Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity…name your value. Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.”

36. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone

37. “happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion.”

38. “Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off our connection to God, to other people, and even to our own soul.”

39. “hurry is a form of violence on the soul.”

40. “For many 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.14”

41. Walk slower. One of the best ways to slow down your overall pace of life is to literally slow down your body. Force yourself to move through the world at a relaxed pace

42. “If you want to experience the life “to the full” of Jesus, his nonstop, conscious enjoyment of God’s presence and world, all you have to do is adopt not only his theology and ethics but also his lifestyle. Just follow his way. That’s it!”

43. “Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,”7 not the kingdom of entertainment.”

44. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation.

45. “mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It’s the same thing, just missing the best part—Jesus.”

46. “As go the leaders, so goes the church.”3”

47. Slowing

48. “Knowing the exegesis of a text is different than actually becoming the kind of person with the capacity to do what the text says.”

49. “Do you ever catch yourself with the sneaking suspicion that you’ll wake up on your deathbed with this nagging sense that somehow, in all the hurry and busyness and frenetic activity, you missed the most important things?”

50. Our families of origin. None of us start with a blank slate

51. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”

52. “It’s been proven by study after study: there is zero correlation between hurry and productivity. In fact, once you work a certain number of hours in a week, your productivity plummets. Wanna know what the number is? Fifty hours. Ironic: that’s about a six-day workweek. One study found that there was zero difference in productivity between workers who logged seventy hours and those who logged fifty-five.15 Could God be speaking to us even through our bodies?”

53. Our seasons of life and their responsibilities—like going to college or raising a young child or caring for dying parents. In some seasons we just have very little extra time to give away

54. Get into the habit of giving things away.

55. “The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus. And in doing so to recover your soul. To have the warped part of you put back into shape. To experience healing in the deepest parts of your being. To experience what Jesus called “life…to the full.”

56. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” – Mary Oliver

57. “Reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”– Fight Club

58. Single-task.

59. “An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.”

60. Come to a full stop at stop signs

61. Our socioeconomic origins. America is built around the myth of a classless society

62. “think it’s wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology. Technological, and even economic, progress does not necessarily equal human progress.”

63. “Dreaming of the perfect life, which in turn poisons our actual lives.”

64. “In the cruciform kingdom, only the bad things die: image and status and bragging rights, all vanity.”

65. “The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practiced veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of haste”

66. “Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things. … Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.28”

67. “Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it. It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment. It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm. Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity…name your value. Hurry is a sociopathic predator loose in our society.”

68. “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.” Matt 11:38-29

69. “Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control.”

70. “Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.”

71. “When we rush through life, we miss out on the small miracles that are happening all around us.” – Unknown

72. “Life is extraordinarily complex. Change is even more so. Anybody who says differently is selling you something.”

73. “The world may demand your speed, but your soul craves your stillness.” – Unknown

74. Never impulse buy

75. “The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn….”

76. “To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.”

77. “What if the formula “more stuff equals more happiness” is bad math? What if more stuff often just equals more stress? More hours at the office, more debt, more years working in a job I don’t feel called to, more time wasted cleaning and maintaining and fixing and playing with and organizing and reorganizing and updating all that junk I don’t even need. What if more stuff actually equals less of what matters most? Less time. Less financial freedom. Less generosity, which according to Jesus is where the real joy is. Less peace, as I hurry my way through the mall parking lot. Less focus on what life is actually about. Less mental real estate for creativity. Less relationships. Less margin. Less prayer. Less of what I actually ache for? What if I were to reject my culture’s messaging as a half-truth at best, if not a full-on lie, and live into another message? Another gospel?”

78. “The reality is, I want the life, but I’m not willing to adopt the lifestyle behind it. I think that’s how a lot of us feel about Jesus.”

79. “In the torment and the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that, ultimately in this world, there is no finished symphony.” Karl Rahner

80. “Aim at an easy life and your actual life will be marked by a gnawing angst and frustration; aim at an easy yoke and, as John Ortberg once said, “Your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow.”

81. “with hurry, we always lose more than we gain. Here for the win, Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C.”

82. “Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world.”

83. “How do we live an unhurried life and focus on sabbath and soul care without getting into introspective, introverted self-improvement for Jesus?”

84. “Hurry is the enemy of creativity and deep thinking.” – Unknown SAD QUOTES IN BENGALI

85. “Many have noted that the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.”

86. Our eighty or so years of life, if we’re that blessed

87. Live by a budget.

88. “How do we “live deliberately” without going off into the forest to scavenge our own food or abandoning our family? How do we slow down, simplify, and live deliberately right in the middle of the chaos of the noisy, fast-paced, urban, digital world we call home?”

89. Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation

90. “Keep in mind, the Greek word that we translate “salvation” is soteria; it’s the same word we translate “healing.” When you’re reading the New Testament and you read that somebody was “healed” by Jesus and then you read somebody else was “saved” by Jesus, you’re reading the same Greek word.”

91. “To follow Jesus, especially in the Western world, is to live in that same tension between grateful, happy enjoyment of nice, beautiful things, and simplicity. And when in doubt, to err on the side of generous, simple living.”

92. Do what he would do if he were you

93. “There’s no official checklist, but here’s what we suggest: Take email off your phone. Take all social media off your phone, transfer it to a desktop, and schedule set times to check it each day or, ideally, each week. Disable your web browser. I’m a bit lenient on this one since I hate surfing the web on my phone and use this only when people send me links. But this is typically a key facet of a dumbphone. Delete all notifications, including those for texts. I set my phone so I have to (1) unlock it and (2) click on the text message box to (3) even see if I have any text messages. This was a game changer. Ditch news apps or at least news alerts. They are the devil. Delete every single app you don’t need or that doesn’t make your life seriously easier. And keep all the wonder apps that do make life so much easier—maps, calculator, Alaska Airlines, etc. What Knapp put in one box and labeled “The Future.” Consolidate said apps into a few simple boxes so your home screen is free and clear. Finally, set your phone to grayscale mode. This does something neurobiologically that I’m not smart enough to explain, something to do with decreasing dopamine addiction. Google”

94. Cook your own food. And eat in

95. “We have only so much capacity. I’m an introvert. I’m actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small.”

96. Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie

97. “More recently, Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5 Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control. To make a bad problem worse, this is exacerbated by our cultural moment of digital marketing from a society built around the twin gods of accumulation and accomplishment. Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness. They say we see upward of four thousand ads a day, all designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies. Buy this. Do this. Eat this. Drink this. Have this. Watch this. Be this. In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller opined, “It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.”6 Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.”

98. “You. Can’t. Do. It. All.”

99. “margin is “the space between our load and our limits.”

100. “Pretty much the only place we can be alone with our thoughts anymore is in the shower, and it’s only a matter of time until our devices are waterproof, which, in turn, will trigger the apocalypse.”

101. “Hurry is a choice, but so is peace.” – Unknown

102. When you can, share.

103. “For many 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.”

104. “The end isn’t silence and solitude; it’s to come back to God and our true selves. It isn’t Sabbath; it’s a restful, grateful life of ease, appreciation, wonder, and worship. It isn’t simplicity: it’s freedom and focus on what matters most. It isn’t even slowing; it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment.”

105. “I would like to tell my 20-year-old self to go discover the practice and joy and art and need of sabbath.”

106. “You got letters after your name but learned the hard way that intelligence is not the same as wisdom.

107. “What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?”

108. Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures.

109. “The more we rush, the less we accomplish. Slow down and watch your productivity soar.” – Unknown

110. “The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.”

111. Get a flip phone

112. Get a flip phone. Or ditch your cell phone all together.

113. “Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to. That bodes well for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in his world. But not for those who give their attention to the 24-7 news cycle of outrage and anxiety and emotion-charged drama or the nonstop feed of celebrity gossip, titillation, and cultural drivel. (As if we “give” it in the first place; much of it is stolen by a clever algorithm out to monetize our precious attention.) But again: we become what we give our attention to, for better or worse.”

114. “Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet” – St. Ignatius of Loyola

115. “Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”

116. “And like any fight, death comes with the territory. As does sacrifice. For me, I had to die to who I could have been if I’d stayed on the path of upward mobility. Even now there are rare moments when I’ll think, What if? I had to make peace with who I am. And who I’m not. I had to let go of the envy, the fantasy, the cancerous restlessness. To accept, gratefully: this is my life.”

117. “The more we hurry, the less we live.” – Unknown

118. “We achieve inner peace when our schedule aligns with our values.” – Stephen Covey

119. “If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.” – Corrie Ten Boom

120. “Who am I becoming?”

121. Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures

122. “Walter Brueggemann has this great line: “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.”8 It’s true. Watch out for the Sabbath. It will mess with you. First it will mess with one day of your week; then it will mess with your whole life.”

123. “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”13”

124. “Hurry and love are incompatible.”

125. “Hurry is the graveyard of a peaceful mind.” – Unknown

126. “Michael Zigarelli from the Charleston Southern University School of Business conducted the Obstacles to Growth Survey of over twenty thousand Christians across the globe and identified busyness as a major distraction from spiritual life. Listen carefully to his hypothesis: It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.6”

127. “Hurry and love are like oil and water; they simply do not mix.”

128. Our minds. We can only “know in part,” as Paul once said, and the problem is, we don’t know what we don’t know

129. “Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.” – Carl Jung

130. “Very little can be done with hurry that can’t be done better without it. Especially our lives with God. And even our work for God.”

131. When you can, share

132. “Man hurries, God does not. That is why man’s works are uncertain and maimed, while God’s are flawless and sure. My eyes welling with tears, I vowed never to transgress this eternal law again. Like a tree I would be blasted by wind, struck by sun and rain, and would wait with confidence; the long-desired hour of flowering and fruit would come.“

133. Our bodies. As I said, unlike Luke Skywalker, we can be in only one place at a time

134. “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

135. “But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.”

136. “Apparently, I’m known as a “reader.” I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV … 2,737.5 hours.”

137. Get into the habit of giving things away

138. Become like Jesus

139. “People all over the world—outside the church and in—are looking for an escape, a way out from under the crushing weight to life this side of Eden. But there is no escaping it. The best the world can offer is a temporary distraction to delay the inevitable or deny the inescapable. That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape.”

140. Out-of-order priorities—You feel disconnected from your identity and calling

141. “The point of a trellis isn’t to make the vines stand up straight in neat rows, but rather to attain a rich, deep glass of wine. It’s to create space for the vine to grow and bear fruit.”

142. Single – task

143. “Jesus blessed the “poor in spirit”11 by the thousands, gave them the Sermon on the Mount,12 and then sent them home, still poor, but blessed. Jesus’ agenda is to make wounded people whole.”

144. “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 it’s been decades—and you realize you still haven’t gotten around to all the things you said were the most important in your life.”

145. “Love, joy, and peace…are incompatible with hurry.” “The average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day.” (By way of contrast, the psalmist said, “I have set the LORD always before me” [Psalm 16v8, ESV]. What would my life be like if God touched my mind as frequently as I touch my phone?) Freedom perhaps never comes without great cost.”

146. Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation.

147. “To allow yourself to be in the panic, feeling it roll over you, and not going for the fix.”

148. “Mindfulness” is silence for a secular society

149. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude.

150. If you can, take long vacations.

151. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item? LOCATION: 2356

152. “The friend of silence draws near to God.” St. John Climacus

153. Learn to enjoy things without owning them

154. Learn to enjoy things without owning them.

155. God’s call on our lives. I hesitate to say this because it would be easy to misinterpret, but there are limits to God’s call on each of us. I think of Peter’s envy of John’s call over his own less-pleasant assignment of an upside-down crucifixion. Jesus had to lovingly reprimand Peter: “What is that to you? You must follow me. ” Many of us need to hear those same words and find freedom in them

156. Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism

157. Cook your own food. And eat in.

158. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things

159. Irritability—You get mad, frustrated, or just annoyed way too easily

160. “Because of the digital age, there are all sorts of Type B people who are still way over busy, hurried, and stressed out.”

161. Don’t text and drive.

162. “Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept the hard as a pathway to peace. Abide.”

163. “Hurry is violence on the soul.”

164. “Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts.”

165. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone.

166. 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

167. “We sit around sucked into our phones or TV or to-do lists, oblivious to the God who is around us, with us, in us, even more desirous than we are for relationship.”

168. “you’re far more likely to run into the enemy in the form of an alert on your phone while you’re reading your Bible or a multiday Netflix binge or a full-on dopamine addiction to Instagram or a Saturday morning at the office or another soccer game on a Sunday or commitment after commitment after commitment in a life of speed.”

169. “it’s wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want, whether through a practice as intense as fasting or as minor as picking the longest checkout line. That way when somebody else denies us from getting what we want, we don’t respond with anger. We’re already acclimated. We don’t have to get our way to be happy.”

170. Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time.

171. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

172. “He was always in a hurry to get where he was not.”

173. “All too often our hurry is a sign of something else. Something deeper. Usually that we’re running away from something—father wounds, childhood trauma, last names, deep insecurity or deficits of self-worth, fear of failure, pathological inability to accept the limitations of our humanity, or simply boredom with the mundanity of middle life.”

174. “Shifting my morning to having to read for an hour before touching my phone has had a profound effect.”

175. 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

176. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone. Take email off your phone. Take all social media off your phone, transfer it to a desktop, and schedule set times to check it each day or, ideally, each week. Disable your web browser. Delete every single app you don’t need or that doesn’t make your life seriously easier

177. “As Gandhi wisely said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

178. “To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.20 Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.”

179. “Even on the bad days, in the hard moments, in the pain, the crisis, or disappointment, the diagnosis, the grief over all the ways life is less than what it could or should be, even then, I think of AA’s wonderful line: “Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as [Jesus] did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”6”

180. Set times for email.

181. “the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character.”

182. Restlessness—When you actually do try to slow down and rest, you can’t relax

183. “Hurry is the root problem underneath so many of the symptoms of toxicity in our world.”

184. Set a time and a time limit for social media (or just get off it )

185. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”

186. “Hurry and burnout are coming for everybody.”

187. “Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.”

188. Be with Jesus

189. “Slow down and listen to the whispers of your soul, for it knows the path to true fulfillment.” – Unknown

190. “Don’t let the urgency of the world rob you of the peace within your soul.” – Unknown

191. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things.

192. Finally, set your phone to grayscale mode

193. Lack of care for your body—You don’t have time for the basics:

194. “Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it. It kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment.”

195. If you can, take long vacations

196. “The more present we are to the now, the more grateful we are for what is, the more we tap into joy.”

197. “It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.”

198. “Para muchos el gran peligro no es renunciar a nuestra fe, es volvernos tan distraídos, apresurados y preocupados que nos conformemos con una versión mediocre de ella. Que solo nos quedemos con la espuma de nuestra vida en lugar de vivirla.”

199. Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in

200. Live by a budget

201. Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store.

202. Get into the slow lane.

203. “Now I think about a sermon through a Venn diagram of three parts: biblical theology, spiritual formation, and cultural commentary.”

204. “People who keep the sabbath live all seven days differently.”-Walter Brueggeman. It’s true. Watch out for the Sabbath. It will mess with you. First it will mess with one day of your week; then it will mess with your whole life.

205. “One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.”

206. “We feel distant from ourselves. We lose sight of our identities and callings. We get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important.”

207. “We worry about what we worship. If you worship money, it will eat you alive.”

208. Walk slower.

209. Isolation—You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul

210. “Once you discover Truth and wisdom you are tapping into God’s design and intention for the universe.”

211. Take up journaling.

212. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

213. “Hurry and love are incompatible. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day.”

214. Emotional numbness—You just don’t have the capacity to feel another’s pain

215. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item?

216. Kill your TV

217. “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”

218. “Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C. S. Lewis: To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.11”

219. “Hurry keeps us focused on the destination, but it is in the journey where true growth and joy are found.” – Unknown

220. “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.”

221. “As we said earlier, one of the great problems of spirituality in our day and age that so few people feel safe enough to admit is how separated we feel from God. We rarely experience God’s presence throughout our day. “Love, joy, and peace” does not describe the felt experience of many Christians. Often we come to church hoping for a God hit—a fleeting moment of connection to God before we return to the secular wasteland. Could the antidote for this spiritual malaise be as “easy” as silence and solitude? If our theory is right and the problem is more our absence than his, more about our distraction than”

222. “Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.”

223. Don’t text and drive

224. Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism.

225. “In the pursuit of success, don’t forget to take the time to enjoy the journey.” – Unknown

226. Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store. It gives me a few minutes to come off the drug of speed. To pray. To take an inventory of my emotional and spiritual vitals

227. “Busy is a choice. Stress is a choice. Hurry is a choice. You can choose differently.” – Ann Voskamp

228. “Live off the four horsemen of the industrialized food apocalypse: caffeine, sugar, processed carbs, and alcohol. _____”

229. “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

230. “The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do, and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry.”

231. “There’s a reason people talk about ‘walking’ with God, not ‘running’ with God. It’s because God is love.”

232. “Hurry is like a thief that steals away our joy and presence.” – Unknown

233. “in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.”

234. Kill your TV.

235. “When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.”

236. “Learn the unforced rhythms of grace” – Matt 11:28-30 (The Message)

237. “We live in a culture that wants to transgress all limitations, not accept them—to cheat time and space. To “be like God.”

238. “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.”

239. “If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.”

240. Before you buy, ask yourself, By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?

241. “To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.”

242. “Salvation is healing. Even the etymology of our English word salvation comes from the Latin salve.”

243. Never impulse buy.

244. “Hurry is the great enemy of our souls in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” – John Mark Comer

245. “Apparently, I’m known as a “reader.” I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV…2,737.5 hours. Meaning, for just a fraction of the time we give to social media and television, we could all become avid readers to the nth degree. Chu lamented: Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.”

246. “Slow down and savor the moment, for in the rush of life, the important things can easily be missed.” – Unknown

247. Get into the slow lane

248. Drive the speed limit

249. “Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle of choosing to leverage time, money, talents and possessions toward what matters most.” Richard Foster

250. “But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment.”

251. “To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.11 Meaning, very little can be done with hurry that can’t be done better without it. Especially our lives with God. And even our work for God.”

252. “In the stillness of a quiet mind, true clarity and purpose can be found.” – Unknown

253. “Hurry and busyness are the great distractions of our time.” – John Ortberg

254. “But Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world. It’s a spirit of restfulness that comes from abiding, from living in the Father’s loving presence all week long.”

255. “Hurry makes us forget the beauty of the present moment.” – Unknown

256. “Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.”

257. “Image and dust. To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential. We have the Divine’s capacity in our DNA. We’re like God. We were created to “image” his behavior, to rule like he does, to gather up the raw materials of our planet and reshape them into a world for human beings to flourish and thrive. But that’s only half the story. We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers. Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite. Image and dust”

258. “There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.2”

259. “In the pursuit of success, never lose sight of what truly matters.” – Unknown

260. “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.”

261. “In my experience, you have to exegete the cultural narrative as much as you exegete the biblical narrative and point people to Jesus and His gospel.”

262. “To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.”

263. Take up journaling

264. “Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.”

265. “This all reminds me of a line from Psalm 39: “In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.”23”

266. “Hurry chokes out our ability to be fully present and engaged in the moment.” – Unknown

267. Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie.

268. “What you hear very little of—inside or outside the church—is accepting your limitations.”