“Here I raise my Ebenezer, / Hither by Thy help I’ve come; / And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, / Safely to arrive at home. / Jesus sought me when a stranger, / Wand’ring from the fold of God; / He, to rescue me from danger; / Interposed His precious blood.”- LSB 686, Come Thou Fount, v. 2
“Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”- Psalm 34:8 (NIV)
When my friend Cliff and I wanted to play a simple game of baseball, we walked about two blocks to the playground behind Northeast School in Evergreen Park, IL. Our first task when we arrived involved drawing a strike zone box on the back wall of the gym. With chalk – and away from windows.
Any pitch inside the box was a strike. However, if the pitcher caught a fly ball or a grounder on the first bounce, that was an out. In addition, the players judged a ball as a single, double, triple, or home run depending on the distance the ball traveled. No base running.
Finally, a flat brick wall served as an important part of the game. Because the surface contained enough mass to absorb the energy of the fast pitch. Yet, return the rubber ball to the pitcher with enough velocity on a strike. A slow-paced version of MLV The Show 25.
Writing in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (WaterBrook, 2019), John Mark Comer stresses that we are embodied creatures. Whole people. Thus, our minds serve as portals to our whole persona. Hence, how we think carries all sorts of ramifications for how we experience life with God. But as whole people — holistic, integrated, complex — we possess a dizzying amount of energy. So, our apprenticeships to Jesus involve both mind and body. Safely to arrive at home.
Consequently, when we slow down both mind and body, we also can slow down our souls to a pace where they can ‘taste and see that the LORD is good.’ Therefore, we need to engage in the spiritual practice of slowing. John Ortberg defines slowing as cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait.
Furthermore, in The Life You’ve Always Wanted (2002), Pastor Ortberg counsels:
“Again and again, as we pursue spiritual life, we must do battle with hurry. 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.”
So, hurry represents more than just a sign of a disordered schedule. Hurry also equates to a disordered heart. As a result, we cannot follow Jesus at a sprint. Because, to follow Jesus, we can’t go faster than the One who’s leading. And that includes what John Mark Comer refers to as the myth of multitasking. Only God is omnipresent. In contrast, a human body can only do one . . . thing . . . at . . . a . . . time. To multitask means you do a lot of things poorly. Instead of doing one thing well.
Certainly, as theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote in Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now:
“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.”
In conclusion, Pastor Ortberg cautions, the most serious sign of hurry sickness = a diminished capacity to love. Because love takes time, the two are fundamentally incompatible. Time — one thing hurried people lack.
Be fully present to God, other people, your own soul — safely to arrive at home.