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The poet Mary Oliver, not a Christian but a lifelong spiritual seeker, wrote something similar: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”11 Worship and joy start with the capacity to turn our minds’ attention toward the God who is always with us in the now. Silence and Solitude. According to Comer, this is the most important practice. The silence refers to external silence, but also the internal silence that comes from quieting your mind. Solitude means to be alone with God and your own soul, experiencing a sense of inner fulfilment. Silence and solitude can be difficult, because in the quiet we must face worries and fears that we may not have had courage to face before. Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.” Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke—to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease.
God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to. Part two: The solution John writes those words down and waits for more wise insights from Dallas. “That’s a good one. Now what else is there?” Dallas’s answer? “There is nothing else.”Solitude is not isolation--it is how we open up to God. Isolation is what we crave when we neglent solitude--the conditions necessary to nourish our souls. That’s the goal, the end, the vision of success : a quiet life. Of all the adjectives on offer, Paul opts for quiet. Not loud. Not important. Not even impactful. Just quiet.
The Hebrew word Shabbat means ‘to stop.’ But it can also be translated ‘to delight.’ It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.” One of the surprising things I learned when I began to practice Sabbath is that to really enjoy the seventh day, you have to slow down the other six days. Number Three: Simplicity Hurry is the greatest enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate Hurry from your life. Dallas WIllard Let’s take a closer look…Sabbath. The weekly observance of Sabbath helps us practice a spirit of restfulness. It is a time to rest and worship—more than just a ‘day off’. When filtering activities for the Sabbath, Comer recommends “anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.” 12 Sabbath can also be an act of resistance, a way of saying we have enough in the face of our society’s constant clamor for more. Sabbath provides necessary rest—which, ironically, takes effort and intentionality to achieve. We ignore our need for rest at our own peril, since emotional, physical and mental health suffer when we push ourselves too hard for too long. Comer comments, “Sabbath is coming for you, whether as delight or discipline.” 13 In other words, accept the gift of rest now, or you may be forced into an unwanted rest later due to burnout. This book artfully, winsomely, and wisely walks us to the wonder of life in Christ and the joy that can be ours when we keep company with Jesus by living in the unhurried rhythms of grace. If you’d like, you can let Jesus pace your holiday. You can allow the reality of his coming—his Advent—to walk you through the season. Also quite random, but I appreciate his sensitivity to what we consume through movies and tv shows. I have felt pretty alone in my views on the nature of media consumption, but I felt very known and justified in my opinions which were now put to words. The Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han ends his book The Burnout Society with a haunting observation of most people in the Western world:“They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”
Fantastic book. JMC gives an apt snapshot of the landscape of our current cultural moment, and the unique troubles that besiege it, and provides 4 crucial Practices from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as ways to 'stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive' in this context. The night before we left, this guy Ken prayed for me in his posh English accent; he had a word for me about coming to a fork in the road. One road was paved and led to a city with lights. Another was a dirt road into a forest; it led into the dark, into the unknown. I’m to take the unpaved road. So not resign, more like demote myself. I want to lead one church at a time. Novel concept, right? My dream is to slow down, simplify my life around abiding. Walk to work. I want to reset the metrics for success, I say. I want to focus more on who I am becoming in apprenticeship to Jesus. Can I do that? Comer meets with John Ortberg, a California-based pastor and writer, who shares a story about Dallas Williard, who was a philosopher and spiritual leader at USC: We all have our own story of trying to stay sane in the day and age of iPhones and Wi-Fi and the twenty-four-hour news cycle and urbanization and ten-lane freeways with soul-crushing traffic and nonstop noise and a frenetic ninety-miles-per-hour life of go, go, go…
Many of his profound points were actually quotes from other authors that he just tied together, which made me want to read works from these other authors more than his work. All the spiritual masters from inside and outside the Jesus tradition agree on this one (as do secular psychologists, mindfulness experts, etc.): if there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into. What, if anything, seems to be contributing most to any sense of soul hurry within you in this season? John Mark Comer’s transparency invites us to reconsider how we live our lives by getting straight to the point: if we don’t eliminate our busyness, we just may eliminate our souls.The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry will inspire you to make the hard but practical choices that will utterly change your trajectory for the better.” —Gabe Lyons,president of Q Ideas and author of Good Faith Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
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