Ruthless Elimination of Hurry | Unhurried

We have fast, distracted, overextended lives. All of us do. And because of it, we are missing out on actually living. For those who follow the Way of Jesus, we also miss Jesus in all the hurried distraction. It is for this reason that Dallas Willard said, “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” It is why psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.”

Hurry is killing our spiritual, physical and emotional life. We all want a healthy, whole life, even if we are unsure how to get there. What if the answer was simply slowing down and un-hurrying? What if all you had to do was slow down long enough for your blur of a life to come into focus? What if slowing so that your spiritual, emotional and physical wellbeing would return to flourishing, would you do it?

Slowing is part of the antidote, but to experience full healing from hurry we must slow with Jesus. Jesus offers us an unhurried life. He offers us a life that allows us to “live freely and lightly,” as the late Eugene Peterson put it. But we have to slow long enough to accept His offer and live into it, which is precisely what we will see today in his encounter with the two sisters, Mary and Martha.