I came across this book thanks to Amazon's recommendation engine, and boy am I glad I did. This was my favorite read of 2019. After a few months I realized many people in my circles were also reading it, so I would have inevitably encountered this book regardless.
I love Comer's style of writing. Throughout the book, I felt like I was just having a conversation with him. The topic is quite personal and challenging, so the writing style made it that much more approachable for me.
There probably aren't many new ideas in this book. In fact, Comer mostly brings us old ideas and practices and challenges us to consider them for our present-day and age. In this book, you'll find practical steps to take if you want to feel less anxious and hurried. And you'll also find both scientific and scriptural reasons to back up the practices. (Not to mention plenty of references to other writings over the centuries.)
In twenty minutes of Candy Crush on our morning bus ride, we could pray for every single one of our friends and family members.
I've read this book twice at the time of this writing. And I imagine I'll revisit my notes below, and the book as a whole, from time to time.
"It hits me like a freight train: in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul." (p. 4)
"The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do and thinly way to keep the quota up is to hurry." (p. 21)
"Hurry and love are incompatible." (p. 23)
"To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it." (p. 25)
"Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind." (p. 39)
It's your attention that's for sale. That's a tough pill to swallow. How much is my attention worth? How much should it be worth? 🤔
"What is all this distraction, addiction, and pace of life doing to our souls." (p. 43)
"Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
It kills joy, gratitude, appreciate; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment.
It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wan for it — wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm." (pp. 52-53)
"Because what you give your attention to is the person you become." (p. 54)
"Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.” (p. 55)
"What is it about the human condition that makes it well-nigh impossible for many of us to celebrate both those who are more gifted than we are and our own best work?" (p. 66)
"Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We all have the time we need. The scary part — the part we ignore — is the we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important." (p. 72)
Site: ’The Simple Truth Behind Reading 200 Books a Year,” January 6, 2017, https://medium.com/s/story/the-simple-truth-behind-reading-200-books-a-year-1767cb03af20. Fun fact: if the average person spent his or her annual 3,442.5 hours of social media and TV on reading instead, he or she’d come in at more than 1600 books per year. Just saying.
"In twenty minutes of Candy Crush on our morning bus ride, we could pray for every single one of our friends and family members." (p. 73)
"To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals:"
(p. 77)
"The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus. And in doing so to recover your soul. To have the warped part of you put back into shape. To experience healing in the deepest parts of your being. To experience what Jesus called 'life… to the full.'" (p. 77)
"Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke — to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease. To sep out of the burnout society to a life of soul rest." (p. 80)
"If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus." (p. 82)
"Here’s a conviction of mine: the Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle." (p. 84)
"The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life. … But Jesus as the the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor." (pp. 84-85)
"As an apprentice, copy your Rabbi’s every move. After all, that’s the whole point of apprenticeship." (p. 86)
"Jesus’ schedule was full. To the brim at times. In a good way. Yet he never came off hurried." (p. 91)
"…margin is 'the space between our load and our limits.'” (p. 91)
"Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) said that we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values. That line isn’t from the Bible, but my guess is, if Jesus heard that, he would smile and nod." (p. 94)
"If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and grow, it will wither away."
"Following Jesus has to make it onto your schedule and into your practices or it will simply never happen. Apprenticeship to Jesus will remain an idea, not a reality in your life." (p. 95)
"Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,” not the kingdom of entertainment." (p. 96)
"…he said this way of life is something you have to put… into practice." (p. 106)
"But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation." (p. 114)
"I mean, how do we have any kind of spiritual life at all if we can’t pay attention longer than a goldfish? How do you pray, read the Scriptures, sit under a teaching at church, or rest well on the Sabbath when every chance you get, you reach for the dopamine dispenser that is your phone?" (p. 122)
"Notice, Jesus came out of the wilderness with all sorts of clarity about his identity and calling. He was grounded. Centered. In touch with God and himself. From that place of emotional equilibrium and spiritual succor, he knew precisely what to say yes to and, just as importantly, what to say no to." (p. 126)
"You can’t go three feet in a bookstore or peruse TED.com without hearing all the buzz around mindfulness. And mindfulness is simply silence and solitude for a secular society." (p. 140)
"The Jesus tradition would offer this: human desire is infinite because we were made to live with God forever in his world and nothing less will ever satisfy us, so our only hope is to put desire back in it’s proper place on God. And to put all our other desires in their proper place below God. Not to detach from all desire (as in Stoicism or Buddhism), but to come to the place where we no longer need ____ to live a happy, restful life." (p. 146)
"Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart of God, can satisfy our desires." (p. 146)
"Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness." (p. 147)
"But Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world. It’s a spirit of restfulness that comes from abiding from living in the Father’s loving presence all week long." (p. 149)
"If you’re new to the Sabbath, a question to give shape to your practice is this: What could I do for twenty-four hours that would fill my should with a deep, trotting joy? That would make me spontaneously combust with wonder, awe, gratitude and praise?" (p. 155)
"Eugene Peterson had a name for a day off; he called it a 'bastard Sabbath.' The illegitimate child of the seventh day and Western culture. On a day off you don’t work for your employer (in theory). But you still work. You run errands, catch up around your house or apartment, pay the bills, make an IKEA run (there goes four hours…). And you play! You see a movie, kick the soccer ball with friends, go shopping, cycle through the city. And that’s great stuff, all of it. I love my day off. But those activities don’t make a Sabbath."
"On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship." (p. 161)
"If you aren’t practicing the Sabbath, you’re missing out on the best day of the week, bar none." (p. 172)
"If your story is anything like mine, Sabbath will take you a little while to master. After all, Shabbat is a verb. It’s something you do. A practice, a skill you hone. It took years of trial and error for me. As our kids age into their teens, our practice continues to adapt and iterate." (p. 174)
"The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has made the point that in the Western world, materialism has become the new, dominant system of meaning. He argues atheism hasn’t replace cultural Christianity; shopping has." (p. 180)
"We’re not just brains on legs. We’re whole people. Holistic, integrated, complex, and full of a dissing amount of energy. So our apprenticeships to Jesus have to be whole-person endeavors. Mind and body."
"And if we can slow down both—the pace at which we think and the pace at which we move our bodies through the world—maybe we can slow down our shouls to a place at which they can “taste and see that the LORD is good." And that life in his world is good too." (p. 222)
"Every… single… thing that we let into our minds will have an effect on our souls." (p. 233)
"If you fill your mind with fornication and wildly unrealistic portrayals of beauty, or romance and sex, or violence and the quest for revenge, or cynical secular sarcasm that we call 'humor,' or a parade of opulent wealth, or simple banality, what shape do you think that will give to your soul?" (p. 233)
"Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts." (p. 234)
"My point is, one of the best ways to slow down your overall pace of life is to literally slow down your body. Force yourself to move through the world at a relaxed pace." (p. 237)
"I absolutely cannot express how much the practice of a monthly day of silence and solitude is formative for my person." (p. 238)
"…my Rabbi teaches that happiness isn’t the result of circumstances but of character and communion." (p. 250)
"What’s hard isn’t following Jesus. What’s hard is following myself, doing my life my 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." (p. 255)
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