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John Mark Comer paused and reflected, “I started to envision myself at forty. Fifty. Sixty. It’s not pretty. I see a man who is ‘successful,’ but by all the wrong metrics: church size, book sales, speaking invites, social stats, etc., and the new American dream—your own Wikipedia page. In spite of all my talk about Jesus, I see a man who is emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow. Oh, and always in a hurry. Why am I in such a rush to become somebody I don’t even like? It hits me like a freight train: 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. I don’t want this to be my life…”

Comer admits, “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.”

The Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han ends his book The Burnout Society with a haunting observation of most people in the Western world: “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”

Comer explains that he looks to the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who invites us, “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” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Jesus invites all of us to take up the “easy” yoke. He has—on offer to all—an easy way to shoulder the weight of life with his triumvirate of love, joy, and peace. As Eugene Peterson translated Jesus’ iconic line: “to live freely and lightly.”

Part One: The Problem

Hurry: the great enemy of spiritual life

John Ortberg called up Dallas Willard for advice in the late-1990s when Ortberg was working at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago—one of the most influential churches in the world. Ortberg was a well-known teacher and best-selling author—the kind of guy you figure pretty much has apprenticeship to Jesus down. But behind the scenes he felt like he was getting sucked into the vortex of megachurch insanity.

So, Ortberg called up Willard and asked, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?” There’s a long silence on the other end of the line… According to Ortberg, “With Willard there’s always a long silence on the other end of the line.” Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

Can we just hit stop for a minute and agree, that’s brilliant? Thanks…

Ortberg then scribbles that line down in his journal—sadly this was before Twitter; otherwise that would have broken the internet. Then he asks, “Okay, what else?” Another long silence… Willard: “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” End of story.

Satan doesn’t show up as a demon with a pitchfork and gravelly smoker voice or as Will Ferrell with an electric guitar and fire on Saturday Night Live. He’s far more intelligent than we give him credit for. Today, 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.

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.

The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives. 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. That kind of busy is what has us all reeling.

As the Finnish proverb so eloquently quips, “God did not create hurry.”

Hurry and love are incompatible. Comer reflects, “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.”

Hence, in the apostle Paul’s definition of love, the first descriptor is “patient.”

In the upside-down kingdom, our value system is turned on its head: hurry is of the devil; slow is of Jesus, because Jesus is what love looks like in flesh and blood. 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.

Ortberg once wisely observed: “I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”

Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C. S. Lewis, wrote, “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.”

Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic writer put it this way with hurricane force, “Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.”

As Ortberg has said, “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.”

Could it be that Willard was right? That an overbusy, digitally distracted life of speed is the greatest threat to spiritual life that we face in the modern world?

A brief history of speed

The sundial (aka the original Casio)

As far back as approximately 200 BC, people were complaining about what this “new” technology was doing to society. The Roman playwright Plautus turned anger into poetry, “The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions!” Next time you’re running late, just quote a little Plautus.

Most historians point to 1370 as the turning point in the West’s relationship to time. That year the first public clock tower was erected in Cologne, Germany. The clock created artificial time—the slog of the nine-to-five all year long. We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our alarms droned their oppressive siren—not when our bodies were done resting. We became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being.

Then in 1879, Edison’s light bulb made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay, brace yourself for this next stat: before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night. Yes: eleven.

Now, at least in America, we’re down to about seven as the median number of hours of sleep per night. That’s two and a half hours less sleep than just a century ago. Is it any wonder that we’re exhausted all the time?

In the 1960s futurists all over the world—from sci-fi writers to political theorists—thought that by now we’d all be working way fewer hours. One famous Senate subcommittee in 1967 was told that by 1985, the average American would work only twenty-two hours a week for twenty-seven weeks a year. Everybody thought the main problem in the future would be too much leisure. The exact opposite has happened: leisure time has gone down. The average American works nearly four more weeks per year than they did in 1979.

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.

When the history books are written, they will point to 2007 as an inflection point on par with 1440. And 1440, of course, was the year Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which set the stage for the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, which together transformed Europe and the world. And 2007? Drumroll…The year Steve Jobs released the iPhone into the wild.

Right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction. Because that’s where the money is.

Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds. To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.

Microsoft researcher Linda Stone said “continuous partial attention” is our new normal.

It’s wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology. Technological, and even economic, progress does not necessarily equal human progress. Just because it’s newer and/or faster doesn’t mean it’s better (as heretical as that sounds). Don’t get sucked into the capitalistic marketing ploy. What looks like progression is often regression with an agenda. Others get rich; you get distracted and addicted.

Something is deeply wrong

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness.

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—defined it 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.

Here are ten symptoms of hurry sickness. Check if any of these ring true for you:

Irritability—You get mad, frustrated, or just annoyed way too easily.
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.
Restlessness—When you actually do try to slow down and rest, you can’t relax.
Workaholism (or just nonstop activity)—You just don’t know when to stop. Or worse, you can’t stop. 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.
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.
Out-of-order priorities—You feel disconnected from your identity and calling.
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.
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, or surfing the web—name your preferred cultural narcotic.
Slippage of spiritual disciplines—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.
Isolation—You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul. On those rare times when you actually stop to pray (and by pray, it’s not asking God for stuff but sitting 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.

In one recent study 39 percent of Americans reported being more anxious than they were a year ago. That’s not something to keep your eye on; it’s an emotional epidemic. As Comer’s grandma used to say, “Just because everybody’s doing it, don’t make it smart.”

Thomas Merton once called “the rush and pressure of modern life” a “pervasive form of contemporary violence.”

Regardless of our income levels, attention is our scarcest resource. Jesus wisely said our hearts will follow behind our treasures.

So many people live without a sense of God’s presence through the day. 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.

John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”

In the meritocracy of the West, it’s easy to feel like we’re only as good as our next sales commissions or quarterly reports or music singles or sermons or Instagram posts or new toys. So we’re constantly out of breath, chasing the ever-elusive wind.

Part Two: The Solution

Hint: the solution isn’t more time

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

There’s a lot of talk right now about reaching your full potential, but that’s only half the story. What you hear very little of—inside or outside the church—is accepting your limitations.

You. Can’t. Do. It. All.

We have limitations. Lots of them. The limitations include but are not, well, limited to these:

Our bodies.
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.
Our giftings.
Our personalities and emotional wiring. We have only so much capacity.
Our families of origin.
Our socioeconomic origins. America is built around the myth of a classless society. A myth that conceals a deep well of injustice. The truth is, even in our land of opportunity, some people just have more opportunity than others. One of the great tragedies of America is that privilege is all too often (if not usually) connected to the color of your skin. If you’re white, male, and middle class, you realize after a while that you started the game from third base; some of your friends started in the parking lot.
Our education and careers.
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. Our eighty or so years of life, if we’re that blessed. There’s no guarantee. But whether we live to 18 or 108, life is fleeting. One New Testament writer called it “a wisp.”
God’s call on our lives. There are limits to God’s call on each of us. Consider 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.

Life is a series of choices. Every yes is a thousand nos. Every activity we give our time to is a thousand other activities we can’t give our time to. We have to learn to say no. Constantly. As Anne Lamott so humorously pointed out, “ ‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

How we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).

The secret of the easy yoke

Like every rabbi in his day, Jesus addressed the epidemic or hurry with things.

A Yoke. It was his set of teachings on how to be human. His way to shoulder the (at times crippling) weight of life—marriage, divorce, prayer, money, sex, conflict resolution, government—all of it.
Apprentices. In Hebrew the word is talmidim. It’s usually translated as “disciples,” and that’s just fine, but an even better word to capture the idea behind talmidim is “apprentices.” To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: (1) Be with Jesus. (2) Become like Jesus. (3) Do what he would do if he were you. The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus.

“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.”

Now consider Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of those same verses in The Message. Again, slowly: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

In her BuzzFeed article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Anne Petersen commented that “burnout isn’t a place to visit and come back from; it’s our permanent residence.”

Hidden in plain sight in this invitation of Jesus is what Dallas Willard called “the secret of the easy yoke.” He wrote this about Matthew 11: In this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as [Jesus] lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style… Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the “second mile,” turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone else around us does… It’s a strategy bound to fail.

Comer provides his own paraphrase of the secret of the easy yoke: If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.

Here’s a conviction of Comer’s, “The Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle.”

Eugene Peterson once wrote, “The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life… But Jesus as the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor.”

There’s a common saying in business, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Usually this is applied to widgets and the bottom line, but consider it for life as a whole.

Frederick Dale Bruner is a top scholar on the gospel of Matthew, and his insight into the paradox of an “easy yoke” is worth reading: 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. An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.

What we’re really talking about is a rule of life

Jesus was rarely in a hurry.

Jesus was teaching in a synagogue when this guy Jairus literally fell at Jesus’ feet, begging him to come and heal his little girl who was “at the point of death.” Again, life or death. But on the way to Jairus’s home, a woman with a chronic health condition that went back twelve years interrupted Jesus. There’s a beautiful story where Jesus just took all the time in the world with her. No rush at all.

Jesus was constantly interrupted—read the Gospels; half the stories are interruptions!—yet he never comes off as agitated or annoyed.

Jesus’ schedule was full. To the brim at times. In a good way. Yet he never came off hurried. Jesus made sure to inject a healthy dose of margin into his life. It’s been said that margin is “the space between our load and our limits.” For many of us there is no space between our loads and limits.

What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and growth, it will wither away.

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,” not the kingdom of entertainment.

Intermission: Wait, what are the spiritual disciplines again?

They are the “practices of Jesus.” At the beginning and end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he said this way of life is something you have to “put…into practice.”

Whatever you call them, these habits, practices, or spiritual disciplines are how we follow Jesus. How we adopt his lifestyle.

Dallas Willard’s defines a spiritual discipline, “The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself.”

Through practices—ordinary, easy, and life-giving practices—grounded in the life of Jesus, we gain access to a life-power far beyond our own.

Jesus never commands you to wake up in the morning and have a quiet time, read your Bible, live in community, practice Sabbath, give your money to the poor, or any of the core practices from his way. He just does these practices and then says, “Follow me.” As we said earlier, many scholars argue a better translation of Jesus’ original language is “Apprentice under me.” Here’s another option: “Copy the details of my life. Take the template of my day-to-day life as your own.”

Part Three: Four practices for unhurrying your life

Silence and solitude

A survey from Microsoft found that 77 percent of young adults answered “Yes” when asked, “When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone.”

Andrew Sullivan, in his manifesto for silence in an age of noise, wrote this, “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.”

The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God, drowning out the one input we most need.

Jesus and the quiet place

Mark 1 is essentially one long chapter about Jesus’ first day on the job as the Messiah. It was a marathon day; he was up early, teaching in the synagogue, then healing Peter’s mother-in-law over lunch, then up late healing the sick and demonized. He must have been well beyond exhausted. Yet then we read this, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place [eremos], where he prayed. You would think Jesus would have slept in, gone for a light run, and then had brunch with his disciples.”

But instead Jesus was up early and out the door to the quiet place. In Luke, Jesus went to his quiet place no less than nine times.

From Luke 5, “The news about [Jesus] spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. Crowds banging down Jesus’ front door was a regular thing. But look at the next line: Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”

In Luke’s gospel in particular, you can chart Jesus’ life along two axis points: the busier and more in demand and famous Jesus became, the more he withdrew to his quiet place to pray. Usually for us it’s the exact opposite.

Silence and solitude

Through the years this practice of Jesus has come to be called “silence and solitude.”

There are two dimensions of silence—external and internal.

C. S. Lewis, in his masterwork of satire, The Screwtape Letters, has the demons railing against silence as a danger to their cause (the ruin of a Christian’s soul). Senior demon Screwtape calls the devil’s realm a “Kingdom of Noise” and claims, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”

Internal noise is the mental chatter that just never shuts up. The running commentary in our heads on everything.

Solitude is pretty straightforward. It’s when you’re alone, with God and with your own soul. For clarification, solitude doesn’t mean isolation. The two are worlds apart. Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter.

In his masterpiece Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster wrote, “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

Henri Nouwen said it bluntly, yet eloquently, “Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life… We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.”

There’s a saying in parenting literature: “To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E.” There’s truth in that.

You can’t go three feet in a bookstore or peruse TED.com without hearing all the buzz around mindfulness. And mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It’s the same thing, just missing the best part—Jesus. Followers of Jesus have been doing this for thousands of years; we just called it prayer or meditation or contemplation.

Andrew Sullivan wrote, “If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.”

Sabbath

Desire is infinite. It has no limit. No point at which it’s ever satisfied. The problem is, we are finite; we have all sorts of limits, remember? So the result is restlessness. Or in the language of math: infinite desire – finite soul = restlessness.

One of the most famous lines of the way of Jesus post–New Testament is from Saint Augustine:

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.”

The word Sabbath comes to us from the Hebrew Shabbat. The word literally means “to stop.” The Sabbath is simply a day to stop: stop working, stop wanting, stop worrying, just stop. 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.

The writer of Hebrews, speaking of Sabbath and its spirit of restfulness, called us to “make every effort to enter that rest.” Notice the irony of that command; we are to work hard to rest well. There is a discipline to the Sabbath that is really hard for a lot of us.

Sabbath is the primary discipline, or practice, by which we cultivate the spirit of restfulness in our lives as a whole.

Walter Brueggemann has this great line, “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.”

First-century Jews needed to hear the second half of that command: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” They had it backward, cart before the horse and all that.

Comer’s fellow Portlander and friend A. J. Swoboda wrote this, “[The Sabbath] has largely been forgotten by the church, which has uncritically mimicked the rhythms of the industrial and success-obsessed West. The result? Our road-weary, exhausted churches have largely failed to integrate Sabbath into their lives as vital elements of Christian discipleship. It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore. He continued: We have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.”

Twenty-first-century Americans (and, yes, the UK, Australia, and Iceland too) need to hear the first half of that command: “The Sabbath was made for man.” It was created, designed, by God himself. And it’s “for” us.

When we fight this work-six-days, Sabbath-one-day rhythm, we go against the grain of the universe. And to quote the philosopher H. H. Farmer, “If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”

Christians called Seventh-day Adventists, are religious, literally, about the Sabbath. This doctor noted that they lived ten years longer than the average American. Do the math. If you Sabbath every seven days, it adds up to—wait for it—ten years over a lifetime. Almost exactly. So when we say the Sabbath is life giving, that’s not empty rhetoric. If this study is to be believed, every day you Sabbath, you’re (statistically and scientifically) likely to get back an elongated life.

Apparently there’s something about the human condition that makes us want to hurry our way through life as fast as we possibly can, to rebel against the limitations of time itself. Due to our immaturity, dysfunction, and addiction, God has to command his people to do something deeply life giving—rest.

If you were to configure the Ten Commandments as a pie chart, this one would take up over 30 percent of the pie. And what was the command? Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Then God said this, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God.”

On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship. For Sabbath, run each activity through this twin grid: Is this rest and worship? If the answer is “No,” or “Kind of, but not really,” or “Umm…,” then hold off. There are six other days for that. What’s the rush…if you’re not in a hurry?

Then the command ended with the why, the driving motivation behind the Sabbath, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. The Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments with a ‘why’ behind it.”

In Exodus, the Sabbath command is grounded in the creation story. In the rhythm that God built into the world. A rhythm we tap into for emotional health and spiritual life. That’s the reason to Sabbath. But in Deuteronomy the command is grounded in the exodus story. In Israel’s freedom from slavery to Pharaoh and his empire. That’s a whole other reason to Sabbath.

When you practice Sabbath to really enjoy the seventh day, you have to slow down the other six days. The Sabbath isn’t just a twenty-four-hour time slot in your weekly schedule; it’s a spirit of restfulness that goes with you throughout your week. A way of living with “ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer.”

Simplicity

Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.

Matthew 6 says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Seek first [God’s] kingdom.”

“The gospel of America” makes the exact opposite claim. In a nutshell: the more you have, the happier you will be. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has made the point that in the Western world, materialism has become the new, dominant system of meaning. He argues atheism hasn’t replaced cultural Christianity; shopping has. We now get our meaning in life from what we consume.

Shopping is now the number one leisure activity in America, usurping the place previously held by religion. Amazon.com is the new temple. The Visa statement is the new altar. Double-clicking is the new liturgy. Lifestyle bloggers are the priests and priestesses. Money is the new god.

There’s a reason the only other god Jesus ever called out by name was Mammon—the god of money.

Our nation is a social experiment built around the pursuit of happiness. But it wasn’t until quite recently that we redefined happiness as making lots of money and owning lots of stuff.

Only a century ago (a blip on the history time line), 90 percent of Americans were farmers. Today only 2 percent of Americans work in agriculture.

In 1927 one journalist observed this about America: A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.

Fast-forward to today: our “consumer” economy is now built around people spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need.

As Western wealth and technology continue to rise, many psychologists point out that our happiness is not increasing at pace. In fact, some studies indicate that as a nation’s wealth goes up, its happiness goes down.

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, in his book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, noted this, “Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness.”

Dr. Angus Deaton, a well-respected economist, said, “No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.”

As the oil tycoon John Rockefeller so famously said when asked how much money is “enough”: “Just a little bit more.”

The truth? Poverty is really hard and a middle-class life is a real gift, but after that it’s the law of diminishing returns. In fact, more money might just be “mo problems.”

Richard Foster called our culture’s view of things “psychotic” in that it has completely lost touch with reality. He wisely observed, “We in the West are guinea pigs in one huge economic experiment in consumption.”

Consider this line from Psalm 39: “In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.”

Remember those predictions from the Nixon era that by now we’d all be working three or four hours each morning and playing golf in the afternoon while the robots made our living for us? What happened?

Instead of spending money to get time, we opted for the reverse: we spend time to get money.

So many of Jesus’ teachings—especially on money and stuff—were just telling stories about the way the world actually is. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Notice: that’s not a command, much less an arbitrary law. It’s a counterintuitive observation of the human condition. You cannot serve both God and money. Notice, again, not a command. He didn’t say, “You shouldn’t serve both God and money.” He said, “You can’t.” Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions. Yet again, he didn’t command, “Don’t buy more than three pairs of shoes.” He just made a statement about the way life actually works.

Consider Tyler Durden’s advice, “Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.” (And, yes, that was a quote from Fight Club.)

Jesus took it over the finish line, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

You simply can’t live the freedom way of Jesus and get sucked into the overconsumption that is normal in our society. The two are mutually exclusive. You have to pick. Minimalism isn’t about living with nothing; it’s about living with less.

Joshua Becker, a follower of Jesus and former pastor who now writes about minimalism full time, defined it these ways, “The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them.”

As Thoreau joyfully said after going off into the woods for a multiyear experiment in simple living, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand…. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

With zero guilt trip, to put things in perspective, if you make $25,000 a year or more, you’re in the top 10 percent of the world’s wealth. And if you make $34,000 a year or more, you’re in the top 1 percent.

As Richard Foster noted, “a carefree unconcern for possessions” is what “marks life in the kingdom.”

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.

Consider these principles, then the practice itself. Note: these are principles, not rules; this is about more freedom, not more rules. Here are twelve:

Before you buy something, ask yourself, “What is the true cost of this item? Measure hurry. What will this do to the pace of my life? Speed it up or slow it down?”
Before you buy, ask yourself, “By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?” Scientists argue it would take something like five earths for everyone on the planet to live with the same ecological footprint as the average American. In the 1960s, 95 percent of our clothes were made in America, and Americans spent on average 10 percent of their annual budget on clothing and owned very few items. Today only 2 percent of our clothing is made in the US, and we spend only around 4 percent of our annual budgets on it—a decrease of 500 percent. How did our clothing get so cheap? Well, multinational corporations started making our clothes in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh, where government corruption is rife and officials do little or nothing to stop the victimization of workers.
Never impulse buy.
When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things. Before you go out and buy some high-quality thing, always ask yourself, “Do I actually need this?” The English designer William Morris offered a good rule of thumb: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
When you can, share. As one early church father said, “We hold everything in common except our wives.”
Get into the habit of giving things away.
Live by a budget.
Learn to enjoy things without owning them.
Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation.
Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures. Every evening stroll, every sunrise, every good conversation with an old friend is a potential portal to the grateful, joyful enjoyment of life in God’s world. This po”ture of living says less about our income and more about our relationship to time and the kind of attention we give to God and the goodness of his world.
Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie. As one Quaker so provocatively said, “Refuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry.”
Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism. We often hear, “Less, but better.” But what if less is better? This is the message our culture so desperately needs to hear.

Remember: the question we should be constantly asking as followers of Jesus isn’t actually, “What would Jesus do?” A more helpful question is, “What would Jesus do if he were me? If he had my gender, my career, my income, my relationship status? If he was born the same year as me? Lived in the same city as me? What would that look like?” To follow Jesus is to ask that question until our last breath.

Consider Paul’s line in Philippians, “I can do all things through [Christ] who strengthens me.” People tear that line out of context all the time. They use it for raising money at the church or getting that promotion or beating cancer or raising a family. All good things. But do you know what Paul was writing about in context? Contentment. The line right before that is as follows, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”

Contentment isn’t some Buddhist-like negation of all desire; it’s living in such a way that your unfulfilled desires no longer curb your happiness.

Slowing

There is a truism that we achieve inner peace when our schedules are aligned with our values. To translate to our apprenticeships to Jesus: if our values are life with Jesus and a growing in maturity toward love, joy, and peace, then our schedules and the set of practices that make up our days and weeks, which together essentially constitute our rules of life, are the ways we achieve inner peace.

Could it be that we need a few new spiritual disciplines to survive the modern world? Counterhabits to wage war against what the futurist David Zach called “hyperliving—skimming along the surface of life”

You will find more and more teachers of the way talking about it, as a protest against the new normal of hyperliving. John Ortberg and Richard Foster both labeled this emerging practice the spiritual discipline of “slowing.” Ortberg defined it as “cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait.”

Here are twenty ideas for slowing down your overall pace of life.

Drive the speed limit.
Get into the slow lane. Use it as a chance to practice presence—to God, to the world, to your own soul. If you think about it, driving is a great time to pray.
Come to a full stop at stop signs.
Don’t text and drive. Remember the 1950s when people would just go “driving”?
Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone. What could you do with ten full leisurely minutes? Chat with a human being waiting beside you?
Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store. It’s a way to slow down your life and deal with the hurry in your soul. It gives you a few minutes to come off the drug of speed. To pray. To take an inventory of your emotional and spiritual vitals. And, when you get up to the cashier, to express the love of the Father toward him or her, simply by saying hello, asking a few questions, and saying thank you.
Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone.
Get a flip phone. Or ditch your cell phone all together.
Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.
Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time. The stats are ominous: 75 percent of people sleep next to their phones, and 90 percent of us check our phones immediately upon waking. Listen: do not let your phone set your emotional equilibrium and your news feed set your view of the world. Let prayer set your emotional equilibrium and Scripture set your view of the world. Begin your day in the spirit of God’s presence and the truth of his Scriptures.
Set times for email. Pretty much every self-help writer, time-management guru, workplace-efficiency expert, opinion blogger, etc. all say the same thing. Do not have email on your phone. Remember: the more email you do, the more email you do.
Set a time and a time limit for social media (or just get off it).
Kill your TV. When asked about the competition from Amazon Prime and other up-and-coming streaming services, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, shrugged. He said their biggest competition is sleep.
Single-task. Multitasking is a myth. From the legendary Walter Brueggemann, “Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing. I want to be fully present to the moment: to God, other people, work in the world, and my own soul.”
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.
Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude.
Take up journaling. The point is to slow down long enough to observe your life from the outside. As the Greek once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Experiment with mindfulness and meditation. Think Psalm 1: “Blessed is the one…who meditates on his law day and night.” In meditation of the Hebrew/Jesus variety, you don’t just empty your mind (of the noise, chaos, anxiety, etc.), but you fill your mind with Scripture, with truth, with the voice of the Holy Spirit. Tim Keller wrote, “Persons who meditate become people of substance who have thought things out and have deep convictions, who can explain difficult concepts in simple language, and who have good reasons behind everything they do. Many people do not meditate. They skim everything, picking and choosing on impulse, having no thought-out reasons for their behavior. Following whims, they live shallow lives.”
If you can, take long vacations. Only 14 percent of Americans take vacations that last longer than two weeks, and a whopping 37 percent of us take fewer than seven vacation days a year. Take as long a vacation as you can, as often as you can.
Cook your own food. And eat in.

Epilogue: A quiet life

Consider the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer: That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with [Jesus] forever in the next.

Comer reflected, “It’s been five years since I quit my job, got off the hurry-train, and opted for the unpaved road into the unknown. I’ve reorganized my life around three very simple goals: Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.”

Nicholas Herman, the Parisian monk better known as Brother Lawrence, called this way of life “the practice of the presence of God” because it takes practice to live from attention and awareness. Especially in the modern world.

Alcoholics Anonymous has this 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.”

Jesus teaches that happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion.

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, he wrote, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” Think about the juxtaposition of Paul’s words. The word “ambition” next to the word “quiet.”

In 1 Thessalonians 4:10-11, Paul says, “We urge you, brothers and sisters…to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” Paul’s line is reminiscent of the long-standing advice of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order), “Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet.”

In the years to come, our world will most likely go from fast to faster; more hurried, more soulless, more rapid; “deceiving and being deceived.”

Comer ends by writing, “This book is both a question and an answer. But mostly it’s an invitation, from one invitee to another. ‘Come to me… Find rest for your souls.’ I say yes. You? Here’s to the easy yoke.”

May you ruthlessly eliminate hurry, as you shoot for the stars!