If we have hurry sickness, we are haunted by the fear that there are just not enough hours in the day to do what needs to be done. We will read faster, talk faster, and when listening, nod faster to encourage the talker to accelerate. We will find ourselves chafing whenever we have to wait. At a stoplight, if there are two lanes and each contains one car, we will find ourselves guessing—based on the year, make, and model of each car—which one will pull away the fastest.

At a grocery store, if we have a choice between two check-out lines, we find ourselves counting how many people are in each line, multiplying this number by the number of items per cart. If we have a really bad case of hurry sickness, then even after we get in line we keep track of the person who would have been me in the other line. If we get through and the person who would have been me is still waiting, we are elated. We’ve won. But if the alter-me is walking out of the store and we’re still in line, we feel depressed. We have hurry sickness.

“Multiple-Tasking”

Despite all this rushing around, the hurry-sick person is still not satisfied. So out of the desperate need to hurry, we find ourselves doing or thinking more than one thing at a time. Psychologists speak of this as polyphasic activity; the more hopeful euphemism is multiple-tasking. (It could be called “doing more than one thing at a time,” but that takes too long to say.) The car is a favorite place for this. Hurry-sick people may drive, eat, drink coffee, monitor the radio, shave or apply makeup, talk on the car phone, and make gestures—all at the same time. Or they may try to watch television, read, eat dinner, and carry on a conversation simultaneously.

Clutter

The lives of the hurry-sick lack simplicity. These people often carry around a time organizer the size of Montana. They keep acquiring stacks of books and magazines and then feel guilty for not reading them. They buy time-saving gadgets and don’t have the time or patience to read the instructions and figure out how to use them.

Paul Pearsall writes that many of these types cannot seem to get rid of their “stuff.” He advises,

You may require a “closet exorcist” experienced in dealing with the demons of closet clutter…. A trusted friendcan also prevent the “restuffing phenomenon.” Restuffing happens when, in the process of cleaning out closets and drawers, we somehow are stimulated to acquire new stuff.

There are other, less material forms of clutter. Life is cluttered when we are weighed down by the burden of all the things we have failed to say no to. Then comes the clutter of forgetting important dates, of missing appointments, of not following through.

Superficiality

“Superficiality is the curse of our age,” writes Richard Foster. If Superficiality is our curse, then Hurry pronounces the spell. Depth always comes slowly.

This is simply a truth about human formation. Perhaps one reason that Abraham Lincoln achieved the depth of thought he did is that he grew up with so little to read. David Donald notes in his biography that Lincoln grew up with access to very few books: the Bible, Aesop’s Fables (which he virtually memorized), and a few others. “He must understand everything—even to the smallest thing—minutely and exactly,” his stepmother remembered. “He would then repeat it over to himself again and again…and when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he never lost that fact or the understanding of it.”

We have largely traded wisdom for information, depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.

Lincoln himself often spoke of how slowly his mind worked, how even as an adult he read laboriously and out loud. His law partner and biographer William Herndon claimed that “Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America.”

But today we have largely traded wisdom for information. We have exchanged depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.

An Inability to Love

The most serious sign of hurry sickness is a diminished capacity to love. Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is one thing hurried people don’t have.

A pilot once told me his favorite airline story. An elderly couple were flying first class, sitting behind a businessman who was enormously frustrated with them. They had been just ahead of him in line at the gate, and again boarding the plane, and they moved slowly, but he was in a hurry. When the meal was served, they delayed the businessman again by having to get some pills from the overhead storage, inadvertently dropping a battered duffel bag. “What’s the matter with you people?” he exploded, loudly enough for the whole cabin to hear. “I’m amazed you ever get anywhere. Why can’t you just stay home?”

To register his anger, the man sat down and reclined his seat back as hard as he could—so hard that the elderly husband’s tray of food spilled all over him and his wife. The flight attendant apologized to the couple profusely: “Is there anything we can do?” she asked. The husband explained it was their fiftieth wedding anniversary and they were flying for the first time. “Let me at least bring you a bottle of wine,” the flight attendant offered.

She did so. When it was uncorked, the old husband stood up, proposed a toast—and poured the bottle over the head of the impatient businessman sitting in front of them.

And, the pilot told me, everybody in the cabin cheered.

Sunset Fatigue

Hurried people cannot love. Lewis Grant suggests we are afflicted with what he calls “sunset fatigue.” When we come home at the end of a day’s work, those who need our love the most, those to whom we are most committed, end up getting the leftovers. Sunset fatigue is when we are just too tired, or too drained, or too preoccupied, to love the people to whom we have made the deepest promises. Sunset fatigue has set in, Grant says, when

• you find yourself rushing even when there’s no reason to;
• there is an underlying tension that causes sharp words or sibling quarrels;
• you set up mock races (“OK, kids, let’s see who can take a bath fastest”) that are really about your own need to get through it;
• you sense a loss of gratitude and wonder;
• you indulge in self-destructive escapes from fatigue: abusing alcohol, watching too much TV, listening to country western music [okay, the last one is mine, not Grant’s].

It is because it kills love that hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life. Hurry lies behind much of the anger and frustration of modern life. Hurry prevents us from receiving love from the Father or giving it to his children. That’s why Jesus never hurried. If we are to follow Jesus, we must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives—because, by definition, we can’t move faster than the one we are following.

We can do this: We can become unhurried people. We can become patient people.

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

We have just released a new Bible Study on the topic: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

These lessons are available on Amazon, as well as a part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription Service. Like Netflix for Bible Lessons, one low subscription gives you access to all our lessons--thousands of them. For a medium-sized church, lessons are as little as $10 per teacher per year.

Each lesson consists of 20 or so ready-to-use questions that get groups talking. Answers are provided in the form of quotes from respected authors such as John Piper, Max Lucado and Beth Moore.

These lessons will save you time as well as provide deep insights from some of the great writers and thinkers from today and generations past.  I also include quotes from the same commentaries that your pastor uses in sermon preparation.

Ultimately, the goal is to create conversations that change lives.