We need to talk about the RIDICULOUS pace of life!

[0:00] okay guys I'm back I took two months off from pretty much everything related to this Channel and in fact two months off for most things it's been a season of intense study and time spent in the word and Diving deep into the Greek and Hebrew on lots of really interesting and exciting passages it's also been a time of dealing with a lot of sickness and uh recovering from that sickness and just having no fun at all while having for instance like head foot hand foot and mouth disease which I thought was something that only kids could get but to be honest um I'd never really thought about getting it as an adult zero out of ten would not recommend but one of the things that arose during my time of study during my reading during my time spent kind of looking into the historical context of the New Testament and all that is how completely different our assumptions are about how life should be paced and that's really what I want to talk to you guys about today our

[0:48] culture whether you're in the United States or really anywhere in the west is just absolutely sick with hurry you can hear it in pretty much everything that we say to each other when we first get together as friends and we start talking in small talking we'll say like okay man how you doing and the first thing that comes out of our mouth is good just busy everybody's always talking about how busy they are even if busy doesn't mean working hard on something it could mean I've got a big long list of shows I want to watch on Netflix or I've got a bunch of books that I want to read or if you're a gamer like me I've got a whole steam backlog of games that I need to play through we are a culture that has completely forgotten how to rest and to be totally honest I'm guilty of this too this is a problem that I have I just recently took on a sales job to kind of take care of my income needs for the next few years and that's of course added a ton of stress that's added a lot of time that I need to spend on the phone taking care of people listening

[1:36] closely trying to assess their needs all the administrative tasks that go into every little detail of making sure that everything's recorded the right way and making sure that I've got decisions written down exactly how things are down it's a lot but it's not more than most other people's jobs jobs in general are stressful they're hard work they take a lot of time they take a lot of focus and energy and that's a good thing especially if what you're doing for work is creating a more garden-like World in your circle of influence we've talked about that in other videos the problem isn't with our work the problem is that we have work and then we have rest time which for us is really just a day off but we don't know how to actually unplug and slow down the pace of our life and so we're dealing with Perpetual burnout or even if we're not in full-on Burnout mode we're in an earlier phase called hurry sickness hurry sickness is when you have that constant low-grade stressed out energy that's keeping you

[2:25] from being able to calmly peacefully walk through the moments of your day if you're constantly driving five to ten miles over the speed limit you have hurry sickness I'm guilty of that one for sure if you're assessing from a distance which of the Lanes on the street or in in the highway has the fewest cars so you can merge into them and speed past people to get around them you have hurry sickness if you actually get upset that there are no available parking spaces close to the grocery store so that you have to park at the other end of the parking lot and walk you have hurry sickness really if you have any kind of like anxiety unrest or consistent low-grade stress because there's no margin in your life you're dealing with hurry sickness and that seems innocuous enough only because it's just kind of what's in the water everybody else deals with this too everybody else has this same problem but it's really dangerous when you start to think about the long-term effects of this thing I was recently helping my son

[3:13] understand how much time he has left before he reaches the age of 18. and in March he's going to turn nine years old so we were doing it in terms of the math of thinking okay well he's got nine years and then he's got another nine years before he hits 18 which is only 3 285 days I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you or a little bit to you but it was not very much when we heard and so we started talking about well how do you want to spend those days how do you want to invest that time do you want to continue fighting with your sister and wasting time playing games that you're never going to remember or are you going to spend time doing things that matter more not that there's anything wrong with playing games that you are going to remember and that do bring Beauty and value to your life but just thinking through okay well I have to be intentional about how I spend this time and that led into a really good conversation about what we actually spend our time doing and whether it's worth doing at all when I decide that I'm gonna watch a new TV show I'm signing up for a minimum of 20 hours of

[4:01] my time being spent on this thing when I say being spent on this thing I mean half spent on this thing and half scrolling on my phone because I'm not enjoying the non-exciting bits of the show that are going on right now and maybe even more because I'm gonna have to rewind and backtrack to the part of the story that I missed that explains the thing that's confusing me five episodes in multitasking is a Surefire sign that you've got hurry sickness this gets really weird when you just assume and you read back your personal experience of being constantly hurried constantly rushed harried stressed having all of this energy floating around your head that you just don't know what to do with and then we read that back into the scriptures and assume that it's the same way in Jesus day stop and think about something for a minute if you were born 2 000 years ago there was no electricity there was no internet there was no television and we all know this of course on a head level but get it down into your heart and think about what Society would have to have been like you had to walk everywhere not run

[4:50] no public transportation only if you were wealthy did you have a carriage and even then you'd have to take care of the animals for that Carriage but everything that you did was walking when we read in the Bible that Jesus was in this one place and then the he and the disciples went to this other place we just think oh yeah they were there suddenly we don't think about how much time was in between in just the walking and spending time outside we're talking several days to a week of travel on foot every day spent walking everywhere you go with nothing to do but listen and talk and just walk and if you're walking at a pace that allows you to walk all day meaning you're not hurrying and rushing through even walking which we do certainly if you live on like the East Coast or in a big city you spend your time hurry walking everywhere but if you're if you're walking at a pace that allows you to walk all day you're walking about three miles an hour think

[5:36] about it everything that launched the kingdom of God in the first century from Jesus and his teachings and everything that he did all his healings throughout all of the different cities the Apostle Paul and all of his missionary Journeys all of that happened at three miles an hour and it turned the entire world upside down and here we are thinking that the key to US changing the world in our day is going 100 miles an hour all the time and leaving no space for ourselves for our souls maybe they knew something that we didn't know maybe they lived a different way intentionally that we could learn from think of all the time spent in prayer think about all the time spent in silence and separated from the rest of society think about Jesus going into the Wilderness by himself to be alone for a while maybe those aren't just weird little quirks about the Jesus story but they're Central features of it

[6:23] maybe the the thing that we need is intentional focused emptiness in our schedule time spent doing nothing but being with God soaking ourselves in the presence of our heavenly father and doing nothing but listen think about how far in the other direction our Christian life has gone in the west our church services are these huge Productions where you go and you you see a show performed by professionals if you have professional musicians you have professional musicians if you have a professional preacher whose job it is to be paid to deliver a great oratory about the word of God that's not a restful activity and then when we talk about the spiritual gifts in the church this is a whole other camera conversation we're gonna have to talk about it another time but like people using their spiritual gifts in the church usually means stacking and unstacking chairs handing out bulletins and running the Facebook live those aren't spiritual activities you don't hear from the Lord you don't

[7:12] receive anything from God you don't give anything in love to other people aside from just setting up the space that they're going to be sitting in or making sure that it gets broadcast on Facebook that's not that's not what the New Testament has anything to say about our church relationships even our church services are hurried if you have a job to do in the service and you're two minutes late do you walk into church feeling ready and feeling like there's margin and space for you to enter into the presence of God and be with your other brothers and sisters and give and receive love and peace and joy in a community of Believers no you feel like you got out of the door late you were rushing to put your fancy clothes on you got in your car and you drove to the building which you think of as the church not the people that fill it and then you're preparing for a performance

[7:58] even in your quiet time isn't there this weird pressure to open up the Bible and study it really deeply instead of just sitting with it and letting it work on you to study it deeply to have a notebook out to take notes I've got to take notes on all of this stuff I need to understand I I set a goal that I was going to read through all of the Proverbs this whole month or I set a goal two months ago that I was going to read through all the way through Isaiah and I just feel like I gotta get going I gotta move I gotta move I gotta get through it and then you pray but your prayers at the end to hurried and you're struggling through it and then you think if you're if you're actually hearing yourself think which is rare enough as it is in this day and age but you're praying and if you're thinking it through you're like I didn't stop to listen to what God had to say I I read the Bible I took notes I prayed but I didn't listen to see if God had anything else to say I just went on with the rest of my day I took two months off of this channel to slow down to create space to

[8:47] create margin to create an area of time in my life where I could breathe get acclimated to my surroundings give transition time between now when I first took this break and then into this next season of life I'm not saying be lazy I'm still working I'm putting in a ton of effort and time and energy and time spent studying but if you don't have the time where you're not running the gas and flooring it and going 100 miles an hour pedal to the metal all the time if you don't have real focused times of rest where you're there's silence there's there's Solitude There's real rest where you don't have you're not carrying a physical load or a mental load or a spiritual load you're just being with God and with your loved ones if you don't have that time probably hurry and maybe Jesus and Paul who spent regular time in silence Solitude going about their life at three miles an hour

[9:35] maybe they knew something that we didn't maybe it doesn't depend on us being constantly active and burning ourselves at both ends of the candle to try to make things happen maybe it depends on a vital relationship between us and the Lord which requires space and margin and time to breathe in order to nurture it what does any of this have to do with eternity frankly I think that you spend your time differently when you recognize that you have Limitless amounts of it of course we're constrained by the limb limited time that we have on this Earth to do what we are required to do on this Earth and our Effectiveness in that time depends on our ability to consistently rest and recharge and give ourselves the space to really restore ourselves in the Lord to go back out and do the things that we're required to do in order to move these purposes and plans for the world forward and make our world a more garden-like place but the truth of the matter is that my eternal life will take on a certain shape it'll take on six

[10:23] days of rest of six days of work and then one day of rest and reflection and partnering with God and connecting with God in that time to reflect on what was done in those six days that's the Sabbath cycle that's the seven day Rhythm that is woven into all of creation that I write about in my biblical structure for the way that life is meant and rhythmed to work is six days of work looking forward to the one day of rest and that one day of rest being the launch pad and the energizing Focus for the next six days of work so if any part of me is being driven by the fear of missing out or thinking that I need to get it all done now or thinking that oh I'm 30 years old now I should have gotten things done before now I'm wasting my time wasting my life think about all these incredible people that did all this stuff before they got to the age of 30. or if there's any part of me that's just hurried and stressed and is going just to go because I don't know how to stop it does me well to remember that I'm heading for an eternal life

[11:12] where I will be spent face to face with God and surrounded by God's people in a world that's perfectly remade doing everything with all of my infinite time that I was created to do and as Paul says in first Thessalonians 4 to make it my ambition to lead a quiet life Paul doesn't mean a life in in just quiet making no impact and making no change he's saying that a life of quiet of space and silence and margin and real deep connection vital relationship with your lord is the way to fulfill all that he has for you it is only in that place that we'll have the energy that we need in our spirit to be able to move forward and do what is required if we give ourselves time to breathe the human relax and to not be sick with hurry and rushing off to live our lives at three miles an hour at least every once in a while remembering that we're not not the

[12:00] ones holding up our corner of the universe God is and because God is I can truly rest I can relax I can let down the side I can say Lord You Take Control you have power you are guiding history twists all I need to do is relax and Trust obey I hope this was helpful let me know in the comments when was the last time you felt really rested and relaxed what were you doing were you on a camping trip was it a lazy Saturday morning when with canceled plans where you just stayed indoors and read and and spent time with your family what was going on and what would it take for you to build more of that kind of margin into your life I would love to hear what you have to say go ahead let me know in the comments and we'll see you next time until then further up further in