The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

Comer returns to the personal/anecdotal style with which he began the book in the Prologue, relating his current experience of pastoring a single church (though still with multiple services) and of his conversations with his mentor, John Ortberg. His journey of practicing the way of Jesus in his own life after resigning from his previous position—about five years ago at the time of writing The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry—has been richly rewarding, teaching him how to pursue the ideal of abiding in the presence of God.

He writes about the four main practices he outlined in Part 3:

These four practices—silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing—have helped me tremendously to move toward abiding as my baseline. But to say it yet again, all four of them are a means to an end. The end isn’t silence and solitude; it’s to come back to God and our true selves (247).

He then ties the ultimate purpose of this endeavor to the idea of “being present […] it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment” (248), thus underscoring the theme of