The ruthless elimination of hurry (book)

I finished John Mark Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World the other day. It was a good read, though maybe a tad bit of a stretch on the title tag-line. Still, this is the stuff my life has been about for awhile now. There is a lot of good information, and not just a few quotables. Here is some of what I underlined and want to remember from the book...

(4) "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 to Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.  I don't want this to be my life..."

(6) "What if I changed my life?"

(23) In his book 'Three Mile an Hour God,' the late Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama put this language around it: "God walks 'slowly' because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has a speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is 'slow' yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love."

(31) "...before Edison (invented the light bulb in 1879) the average person slept eleven hours a night."

(35) This whole section "When the history books are written, they will point to '07 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.  Note: it was also a few months after Facebook opened up to anybody with an email address, the year a microblogging app called Twitter became its own platform, year one of the cloud, along with the App Store, the year Intel switched from silicon to metal chips to keep Moore's law on a roll, and a list of other technological breakthroughs - all right around 2007, the official start date of the digital age."

(37) "...slot machines make more money than the film industry and baseball combined, even though they take only a quarter at a time. Because the slot machine is addictive..."

(39) "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 the customer; you're the product. It's your attention that's for sale, along with your peace of mind. . . . "Never get high on your own supply." . . . "continuous partial attention" is our new normal (Microsoft researcher Linda Stone).

(46) Great story about some African jungle tribesmen who refused to leave too soon because "They are waiting 'for their souls to catch up with their bodies.'" (see whole section)

(47) "...hurry is a form of violence on the soul."

(48-51) Ten Symptoms of Hurry Sickness

(69) Peter Scazzero's line: "We find God's will for our lives in our limitations."

(70) "'No' is a complete sentence." (Anne Lamott)

(71) "...the average guy spends ten thousand hours playing video games by age twenty-one."

(76) "A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi's way of reading the Torah. But it was also more: 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."

(77) What the New Testament writers call 'salvation.' 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. Salvation IS healing."

(82) "If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus."

(94) Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) said that we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values."

(125) **** "The wilderness (for Jesus, in Matt. 3) isn't the place of weakness; it's the place of strength." **** (and below...)

(126) **** "Notice, Jesus came out of the wilderness with all sorts of clarity about his identity and calling. He was grounded. Centered. In touch with God and himself. From that place of emotional equilibrium and spiritual succor, he knew precisely what to say yes to and, just as importantly, what to say no to."

(132) John Climacus - "The friend of silence draws near to God."

(135) Henri Nouwen - "Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life..."

(140-141) "...mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society. It's the same thing, just missing the best part - Jesus. (see paragraph following this) . . . (from Andrew Sullivan) "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."

(170) Ronald Rolheiser - "True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough."

(184ff) *** "Advertising as we now know it started not on Madison Avenue but in another city: Berlin. With another group of power brokers: the Nazis. They took the ideas of an Austrian psychotherapist named Freud... and used them to manipulate the masses." . . . "After the war, it was actually Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who first used Freud's ideas in America. An intelligence officer during the war, he found himself in need of a job. His theory was that if the Nazis could manipulate people in wartime, then surely business owners and politicians could manipulate people in peacetime. He called his new idea 'public relations' and became the so-called 'Father of American advertising.'" [rest of section is needed here - and why I find Capitalism today so deviously evil...]

(186) "Things we categorize as 'needs' - a car, a telephone, a daily multivitamin, electricity, running water - didn't even exist until recently, and yet many people were quite happy without them."

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

(196) "a 'healthy' eye... had a double meaning: It meant that (1) you were focused and living with a high degree of intentionality in life, and (2) you were generous to the poor. When you looked at the world, you saw those in need and did your best to help out."

(200) Joshua Becker - minimalism writer

(204-213) His twelve (suggested) principles to eliminate hurry...

(214) "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?"

(223-244) 20 ideas on how to slow down...

(252) Edward Friedman - "non-anxious presence"

(253) Manifesto: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life." (1 Thess. 4:11)

(254) "To live a quiet life in a world of noise is a flight, a war of attrition, a calm rebellion against the status quo."

(255) "You're not just fighting for a good life but for a good soul."