Eliminating Hurry

May 21, 2019

It’s a regular routine at the Bailey household; family comes for Sunday dinner, and when the table is cleared and the dishes done, everyone begins to drift towards the front door and home. But not everything. With the last goodbye, there are usually shoes, coats, and other sundry items forgotten and left behind. It’s even more pronounced on the weekends when the grandkids spend the night. It can take an entire week to get everything back home where it belongs. 

Sunday was no exception, except it wasn’t one of the kids. It was friend Bob who left behind the book his group is reading, “Soul Keeping,” by John Ortberg, and as long as it was sitting on the arm of my chair, I thought it fitting to take a look inside. I didn’t even get to the first chapter before my attention was arrested. In the prologue, Ortberg relates his first encounter with Dallas Willard, former professor of philosophy at USC and thoughtful author of many books on spiritual disciplines. Ortberg asked him what he needed to do to stay spiritually healthy. Willard paused before responding, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” 

It sounds so simple, and it is. But simple and easy are two very different things, and in a culture obsessed with bigger and better, more and more, eliminating hurry from our lives is no small endeavor. There is always one more meeting, one more activity we believe necessary to cram into our already hectic schedules, and the cultivation of our souls and our relationship with God often becomes just another task we check off our list for the day. And we wonder why we feel so empty, so devoid of meaning and purpose. 

I used to wonder about the mystics and monks of the Church; who were they, and how did they manage to order their lives so there were great blocks of time devoted to prayer and worship? For that matter, how did Moses dare spend forty days and nights on the mountain with God, and not doing anything with or for the people? Weren’t there things to be done, people to be served, miles to be trekked? We can get from place to place in record time, save hours upon hours of work with the tools available to us, yet we drop into bed at night exhausted because there was so much to do and we couldn’t get to it all. Meanwhile, something inside us is dying.

Every so often, someone comes along who challenges this American-style ‘Get-R-Done’ mentality with a whispering, diaphanous call to slow down and pay attention to that inner unrest, to listen to my heart...my soul. I am thankful to Ortberg, Willard, and to many others who have invited me to a different world, and to Bob who left his book on the arm of my chair. It’s time to do exactly what Willard suggested.