I’ll be the first to admit I hurry too much. Maybe you do too? Hurry up! Hurry to work! Hurry the kids into the car!

Hurry has become so much the norm, it’s easy to miss how easily it can choke healthy and sustainable rhythms from our life. Even scarier is how it distracts us from hearing God’s voice in the daily marathon of life.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is pastor and author John Mark Comer’s practical study, reflection and lived experience on how to reorient our lives and loves to pursue Jesus more fully.

Ridding himself of theological jargon, Comer reads like a breath of fresh air in the fast-paced world around us. His book is best read piece-by-piece over the course of time, as you slowly implement practical changes in your life.

Is it possible we were never meant to sustain this pace?

This book is not a self-help program to reach a better life, but an invitation to breathe, rest, and walk at a more sustainable pace.

The title is founded in advice from the late American pastor Dallas Willard (if you haven’t read it, I also recommend Willard’s Renovation of the Heart). Willard said to an over-stressed megachurch pastor: “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

To Willard and Comer, hurry is an epidemic we cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Why? Because maybe you’ve felt it too – our lives fly by in an adrenaline-rush of deadlines, bills and running towards the next big thing. So, is it possible we were never meant to sustain this pace? Is it plausible this could ever change? Is there a better way, and if so – how do we find it?

Comer points to Jesus, whose invitation is to “come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Comer helps us understand that perhaps, instead of constantly trying to achieve more and finding ourselves tired, we could simply accept God’s grace in silence, sabbath, simplicity and slowing down.

I often read books that excite, inspire and motivate me. I finish reading, stand up and want to change the world.

When I finished The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, I went for a walk and took a nap. I felt a lot better that next day.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer is available from Koorong for $27.99. It is published by John Murray Press.