The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

The Uber ride through the city felt endless. Slumped against the window at 10 PM on a Sunday night, the pastor had just finished delivering six sermons in one day. Six. His body ached with exhaustion that ran deeper than physical fatigue. This was soul tiredness, the kind that accumulates when you've been running on empty for too long. Later that night, unable to sleep despite his weariness, he found himself on the couch watching obscure kung fu movies, wondering if this was the beginning of a mental breakdown.

This scene of modern burnout is playing out in millions of lives across our hyperconnected world. We live in an age where being busy has become a badge of honor, where "hustling" is celebrated as virtue, and where the average person touches their phone over 2,600 times a day. Yet despite all our technological advances and time-saving devices, we feel more hurried, more anxious, and more spiritually empty than ever before. The promise of efficiency has delivered us not to freedom, but to a prison of perpetual motion where we're always behind, always catching up, never quite arriving at the peace we desperately crave.

The breaking point came during a leadership meeting. After months of internal struggle and countless conversations with mentors, friends, and family members, the words finally emerged: "I resign." Not from ministry entirely, but from the crushing weight of leading multiple churches and the relentless pace that had become his normal. The decision felt like stepping off a cliff into an unknown future, trading the familiar misery of overcommitment for the uncertain path of intentional living.

The transition wasn't immediate or easy. Like an addict coming off a powerful drug, he experienced withdrawal from the adrenaline of constant activity. The quiet felt uncomfortable. The slower pace initially brought anxiety rather than peace. But gradually, something profound began to shift. He started therapy, began taking actual days off, moved his family closer to work so he could walk instead of drive. Most importantly, he rediscovered practices that had been squeezed out by the demands of a supercharged schedule. Prayer became more than a hurried request for divine assistance. Reading became an act of soul nourishment rather than sermon preparation.

The months that followed revealed a startling truth: everything he thought he needed to accomplish through hurry could be done better through rest. His teaching improved when it flowed from a place of abiding rather than scrambling. His relationships deepened when he was fully present rather than mentally rehearsing the next meeting. His creativity flourished when his mind had space to wander and wonder. The man who once prided himself on being first to the office and last to leave discovered that his most productive self emerged from a foundation of unhurried peace.

What struck him most was how this transformation affected not just his work, but his entire being. The chronic low-grade anxiety that had hummed in the background of his consciousness for years began to fade. The irritability that had made his family walk on eggshells gradually gave way to patience and presence. For the first time in years, he could feel his own soul again, no longer numbed by the relentless pace of modern ministry. This awakening would become the foundation for a completely different way of approaching not just work, but life itself.

The revelation came through studying the deeper patterns of human behavior and cultural change. What masquerades as productivity and efficiency in our modern world is actually a sophisticated form of spiritual warfare. Carl Jung, the pioneering psychologist, once observed that "hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil." This insight cuts to the heart of our contemporary crisis. We've been conditioned to believe that faster is always better, that more is always preferable, that busy equals important.

The statistics paint a sobering picture of our collective addiction to speed. Before Edison's light bulb, the average person slept eleven hours per night. Today, we've cut that down to about seven hours, stealing away the very rest our bodies and minds require for restoration. Our attention spans have shrunk to eight seconds, literally shorter than that of a goldfish. We check our phones within minutes of waking, allowing the digital chaos of the world to set our emotional equilibrium before we've even gotten out of bed. Social media companies have deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive, creating what one former Facebook executive called "a social-validation feedback loop" that exploits vulnerabilities in human psychology.

The deeper tragedy is how this culture of speed has infiltrated even our most sacred spaces. Churches compete on the metrics of business rather than the fruits of the Spirit. Pastors boast about being busy rather than resting in God's presence. Prayer becomes hurried petition rather than contemplative communion. Sabbath disappears entirely, replaced by a slightly slower version of our weekly grind. We've forgotten that love, joy, and peace are fundamentally incompatible with hurry.

This isn't merely a personal problem requiring individual solutions, but a systemic issue that demands a prophetic response. The enemy of our souls doesn't need to tempt us toward obvious sins when he can simply keep us too busy to develop spiritual depth, too distracted to hear God's voice, too hurried to experience the abundant life that Jesus promised. The solution isn't better time management or more efficient systems, but a radical reimagining of what it means to be human in a world designed to keep us perpetually off-balance and spiritually malnourished.

The answer to our contemporary crisis lies not in the latest productivity hack or mindfulness app, but in rediscovering the timeless rhythms that sustained Jesus himself. Despite having only three years for public ministry and facing constant demands from crowds, religious leaders, and his own disciples, Jesus never appears hurried or anxious in the Gospel accounts. His secret wasn't better scheduling but a fundamentally different approach to living.

Jesus regularly withdrew to quiet places for extended periods of prayer and solitude. After his baptism, he spent forty days in the wilderness. Following intense days of ministry, he would rise early and slip away to lonely places where he could commune with his Father. When the disciples were exhausted from their work, Jesus invited them to "come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while." This wasn't escapism but spiritual necessity. The quiet place wasn't where Jesus went to recover from ministry; it was where he went to prepare for it.

He also practiced Sabbath with religious devotion, understanding it not as legalistic rule-keeping but as divine gift. One day each week, Jesus set aside all work to focus entirely on worship and rest. He defended his disciples' right to Sabbath freedom and taught that this rhythm was made for human flourishing, not human bondage. He lived with radical simplicity, owning essentially nothing beyond the clothes on his back, yet enjoying rich relationships and profound contentment.

Perhaps most countercultural of all, Jesus moved through the world at a deliberately slow pace. He was constantly interrupted but never irritated. He took time for children when adults wanted his attention. He stopped for individual needs while crowds pressed around him. When Martha complained that Mary was sitting at his feet instead of helping with preparations, Jesus gently defended the one who had chosen the better part. His entire life demonstrated that presence is more valuable than productivity, that being is more important than doing, and that the kingdom of God advances through rest as much as through work.

The modern world offers us a false bargain: more stuff in exchange for more stress, higher incomes at the cost of hurried lives, endless options that paradoxically leave us feeling empty. Research consistently shows that once basic needs are met, additional wealth contributes little to happiness and may even detract from it. The Princeton study that identified $75,000 as the point of diminishing returns for income revealed something profound about human nature: we were designed for enough, not excess.

Consumer culture has systematically trained us to confuse wants with needs, to believe that happiness is always one purchase away. The average American home has doubled in size since the 1950s while family sizes have halved, yet we still don't have enough space for all our possessions. The rise of the $38 billion self-storage industry represents a tragic commentary on our relationship with material goods. We have so much stuff we don't need that we pay monthly rent for the privilege of storing it.

True simplicity isn't about living in poverty or denying the goodness of God's creation. It's about discerning what actually adds value to life and releasing everything else. When we own fewer possessions, we have more time to enjoy what we do have. When we buy less frequently, we can afford to buy better and more ethically. When we're not constantly maintaining and organizing an excess of belongings, we have energy for relationships, creativity, and spiritual growth.

The path to simplicity requires both practical action and heart transformation. It means asking different questions before purchases: "What is the true cost of this item in terms of time, energy, and attention?" It means choosing quality over quantity, experiences over accumulations, and contentment over constant upgrading. Most radically, it means finding our identity not in what we own but in whose we are, discovering that our deepest needs for security, significance, and joy are met not through acquisition but through relationship with God and authentic community with others.

The smartphone represents perhaps the greatest challenge to unhurried living in human history. These devices, designed by teams of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to be maximally addictive, have colonized our attention in ways we're only beginning to understand. We check them compulsively throughout the day, reaching for them in every moment of potential boredom or silence. They interrupt our conversations, fragment our focus, and create a chronic sense of urgency about matters that are rarely truly urgent.

The solution isn't to completely abandon technology but to establish clear boundaries that preserve space for deeper rhythms. This might mean turning phones off completely during certain hours, removing social media apps, or creating phone-free zones in homes and bedrooms. Many discover that converting their smartphone into a "dumb phone" by removing all non-essential apps creates the benefits of connectivity without the costs of constant distraction.

More fundamentally, reclaiming time requires recovering the lost art of single-tasking. Despite our cultural celebration of multitasking, neuroscience confirms what contemplatives have long known: the human brain can only truly focus on one thing at a time. What we call multitasking is actually rapid task-switching that diminishes the quality of everything we attempt. True productivity and deep satisfaction come from giving our full attention to one activity, one conversation, one moment at a time.

The goal isn't efficiency for its own sake but the cultivation of presence that allows us to fully receive each moment as gift. When we slow down enough to taste our food, to listen without formulating responses, to walk without rushing toward the next destination, we discover that life's richest treasures have been hiding in plain sight. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus taught, belongs to those who receive it like children, and children have mastered the art of being fully present to whatever captures their attention. In our hurried world, such presence has become a radical and revolutionary act.

The journey from hurry to rest isn't merely about time management or stress reduction, though these benefits naturally follow. It's about recovering our humanity in a world that systematically undermines the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Through silence and solitude, we reconnect with God and our own souls. Through Sabbath, we remember that we are more than our productivity. Through simplicity, we discover the freedom that comes from having enough. Through slowing, we learn to receive each moment as gift rather than obstacle.

The invitation extends beyond personal transformation to cultural renewal. As more people choose presence over productivity, community over consumption, and depth over speed, we create spaces where others can remember what it means to be fully alive. The quiet revolution begins with individual choices but ripples outward to families, churches, and communities hungry for an alternative to the exhausting pace of modern life. In a world obsessed with going faster, choosing to go slower becomes a prophetic witness to the goodness of God's design for human existence and the possibility of life that is truly life.