The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

The summary

In the late 1990s, John Ortberg — then on staff at Willow Creek, one of the most influential churches in the world — phoned the philosopher Dallas Willard and asked what he needed to do to become the person he wanted to be. After a long silence, Willard told him to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from his life. Ortberg asked what else. Willard said there was nothing else: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

John Mark Comer built a book on that answer, and the frame is worth naming up front: he’s a pastor, the argument is explicitly Christian, and the model throughout is the life of Jesus. If that isn’t your frame, the diagnosis still lands — it’s drawn as much from psychology, survey data and the author’s own burnout as from scripture.

Comer was leading a fast-growing multisite megachurch in suburban Portland, adding more than a thousand people a year for seven years straight, and by the end he was teaching six times every Sunday. He describes himself then as emotionally flat, quietly anxious, spiritually empty, permanently rushed. The question that cracked it open wasn’t how to fit more in but who am I becoming? His answer was to demote himself: hand back the multisite operation, take one smaller city church, walk to work, keep a Sabbath, work fewer hours.

Hurry is a condition, not a scheduling error

Willard defined hurry as a state of frantic effort you fall into in response to inadequacy, fear and guilt — which puts the problem inside the person, not on the calendar. Comer agrees that a full life isn’t the issue. Busyness turns pathological when you have more to do than the hours hold and the only way to keep the quota up is to rush.

And rushing corrodes exactly what people are rushing toward. Love is slow — patience is the first word in Paul’s description of it. Comer’s worst moments as a husband, father and pastor are all moments when he was late, and what surfaces then is tension and a critical edge, never love.

The resulting condition — hurry sickness, a term out of Friedman and Rosenman’s Type A research — is an unremitting attempt to do more and more in less and less time, and most people will recognize part of the symptom list: irritability, restlessness, workaholism, emotional numbness, a neglected body, escapist habits, abandoned practices, isolation. Michael Zigarelli’s Obstacles to Growth Survey, which polled more than twenty thousand Christians worldwide, found busyness a major obstacle to spiritual life, pastors the most rushed profession he measured, and the whole thing self-feeding: absorb the culture’s pace, drift from anything deeper, grow more susceptible to the culture’s assumptions, speed up again.

The solution isn’t more time

Comer’s second move refuses the obvious fix. Time management treats hurry as arithmetic. But the history he sketches — sundial, mechanical clock, artificial light, labor-saving appliances, the internet, the smartphone — is a run of inventions sold as a way to buy back hours that each raised the ambient speed of life instead.

The measurements agree. dscout’s 2016 study tracked every tap and swipe of 94 people for five days and put the average user at 2,617 touches a day across 145 minutes of screen time; the heaviest hit 5,427. And when Richard Wiseman re-measured how fast people walk down a city street against Robert Levine’s early-1990s numbers, the pace across the sixteen cities common to both studies had risen roughly 10 percent, Singapore up 30.

What’s scarce, Comer argues, isn’t time but the willingness to choose. People find thousands of hours for entertainment and none for what they claim matters most. Accepting a hard limit isn’t an obstacle to a good life; it’s the condition of having one with any shape.

The model is a person, not a system

Here the frame becomes load-bearing. Comer reads the gospels as biography and notices a pace: Jesus is interrupted constantly and never appears hurried. The invitation in Matthew 11 — take my yoke, it’s easy — isn’t a promise that the weight disappears. A yoke is equipment; it’s what makes a load carryable. You can’t have someone’s interior life, the claim goes, while refusing their exterior one: the rhythms, withdrawals and refusals that made it possible.

The structure for that is what monastics call a rule of life — an ordered set of practices holding your days in a shape, like a trellis a plant grows along. You already live by one, Comer points out. Yours was written by the culture, by default, and you never chose it.

Four practices for unhurrying

• Silence and solitude. Time alone with no inputs. Comer is candid that mindfulness is this practice adapted for a secular audience, and treats small pockets of boredom as openings rather than dead air.
• Sabbath. A full day of stopping — not a day off for errands and catch-up. He frames it as resistance: evidence you aren’t owned by your output.
• Simplicity. Fewer possessions, fewer commitments, chosen deliberately. Every purchase costs money and then time; advertising is propaganda for a life you didn’t pick.
• Slowing. Deliberate friction. Drive in the slow lane, take the longest checkout line, single-task, cook, leave the phone in another room. The body trains the soul at least as much as the reverse.

Comer says plainly there’s no formula here, and concedes he isn’t writing from the position of a single mother working two jobs. That’s honest, and it marks the argument’s edge: much hurry is imposed rather than chosen, and this book has little for that case.

The bottom line

Hurry hollows out attention, patience and the relationships you’d name as most important, and no amount of efficiency fixes a life with too much in it. The remedy is unglamorous — fewer things, a deliberate rhythm, real practice at stopping. Read it if you look fine from the outside and feel frayed inside, and don’t mind an argument built on the life of Jesus.