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 The Importance of Living in the Present Moment once again. This idea, Comer notes, is not the sole inheritance of the Christian tradition: Mystics and sages from all cultures throughout human history have argued that the true richness of life is simply to learn how to inhabit the moment in which one finds oneself, and to tame all the desires that would lead us to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

Comer also returns to the core biblical passage on which The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry reflects, Matthew 11:28-30 and the idea of the “easy yoke.” The choice in life is not one between a life of freedom from rules or a life of following Jesus’s morality; it is quite simply a choice between bearing the enormous weight of the yoke of one’s own stress, busyness, and frenetically unfulfilled desires, or taking the “easy yoke” of the way of Jesus, in which one learns the restful art of joy in the presence of God: “What’s hard isn’t following Jesus. What’s hard is following myself, doing life my own way; therein lies the path to exhaustion. With Jesus there’s still a yoke, a weight to life, but it’s an easy yoke, and we never carry it alone” (255).

With this reflection, Comer returns to all three of his main themes: The Dangers of a Hurried Lifestyle, Apprenticeship to Jesus, and The Importance of Living in the Present Moment. The dangers of a hurried lifestyle include the perpetual bondage of our own stress and busyness, which will never abate on their own. The solution is to learn from Jesus, as an apprentice to his ministry as rabbi, not only believing his teachings but imitating his lifestyle and applying it to one’s own circumstances. By doing this, we can follow the practices of Jesus into the same unhurried manner of life that he exemplified, in which he was able to be fully present with God in prayer and fully present in love and service to others around him, not merely rushing on to whatever happened to be the next task in his life.