Everybody seems to be in a hurry. Always late and never time to slow down. It’s especially busy when children are involved in your life.
What do you do when you are in the van-driving, soccer-league, piano-lesson, school-orientation-night years of life? What do you need to do to be spiritually healthy? You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
You don’t have to be a prophet to know that technology has made in our world. Our world has gotten smaller, more complex, and faster-paced.
You live a much faster lifestyle than your parents or grandparents did. And the way the world is going, your children will live an even faster lifestyle than you do. And on top of all that we keep trying to do more and more. It’s taking a toll on us.
This fast paced, pressure cooker lifestyle is so new to the human race that anthropologists are now studying to see how it will affect us long term. Hurry has four dramatic negative impacts on us.
1 – Hurry makes you feel more stressed.
When you’re always in a hurry, your personal reserves get depleted and your stress goes way up. You have to slow down. There’s nothing wrong with going fast unless you never slow down. You’re not the energizer bunny. Just going and going and going causes stress in your life.
2 – Hurry causes you to lose joy.
The faster you go in life, the less time you have to enjoy it. You’ve got to slow down to do that. When you fly at 350 miles an hour I can’t enjoy the scenery at all. When you drive at 70 miles mph, you enjoy it a little bit but miss the details. You’re going too fast. But if you really want to enjoy a town or a city, walk through it. It is in walking that you get the sights and sounds and smells, the details. Enjoyment comes when you slow down.
3 – Hurry causes you to be less productive.
Every creative person knows this. The faster you go, the less productive you really are. Going fast all the time causes you to lose the ability to think and act creatively.
4 – Hurry stops you from hearing God.
If you’re moving at a fast pace in your life all the time, you don’t know God because you can’t know anyone in a hurry. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God.” You get to know God when you slow down, be quiet and become still. All the activity creates too much noise in your life. If you don’t slow down, you will never get to know God.
So try to slow down a little today. Tomorrow I will share with you three Biblical strategies that will help you eliminate hurry in your life.
Has hurry had a negative impact in your life? How?