Too Busy to Be Healed
By Aynsley Vermilya, Derived from Tabl•Ed sessions by Daniel Rife
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
– Matthew 11:28-30
This invitation from Jesus has to apply to us, no matter what season of life we are in—even when it feels impossible.
As soon as I became a father, I began wrestling with this truth. We live in a culture that constantly seeks to amuse us—to our detriment. We have become so entertained that we are numb, unable to recognize when we are broken or hurting.
It’s important for the Church to take Jesus seriously and model our lives around his words. Whose yoke are we actually wearing? Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel light.
Throughout history, humans have somehow managed to get less sleep, work more hours, and have constant access to information. But are our labor-saving devices actually doing their job? What is all this technology and accessibility doing to our souls?
Psychologists use the term “hurry sickness” to describe a behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness. This malaise makes a person feel chronically short on time, causing them to perform every task faster and become flustered by any delay.
Symptoms of hurry sickness include:
Switching checkout lines because another looks shorter
Counting cars to choose the fastest lane
Multitasking to the point of forgetting what you were doing
We think it’s about priorities. We cut corners and seek the fastest route because we believe we have more important things to attend to. But do we even have time to assess our priorities? Or are we worshipping efficiency itself? That hurry sickness has come to our work, too.
There are two types of work: surface work and deep work. When we prioritize efficiency, we fill our days with surface work—emails, small projects, and mindless tasks—so we can check things off a list and feel accomplished. But deep work, the kind that requires real thought, is harder to measure and often doesn’t give us the quick “hit” of shallow achievement.
Jesus got a lot of things done – he did a lot of “deep work,” and yet he lived an unhurried life. Jesus both intentional and interruptible.
Jesus was intentional – he spent time with people, ate with them, invited himself over to their homes, spent time alone with God and together in community, in prayer, in study, and in teaching.
And Jesus was interruptible: the gospels are full of moments when Jesus stopped for someone who needed healing. It’s telling that in 1 Corinthians 13, when Paul describes “love,” the first word he uses is “patient.”
As a parent of young children, I’ve found a deep correlation between love and patience. Some have said that children spell love this way: “T-I-M-E.” Far from following Jesus into a more frenetic life, discipleship calls us to follow Jesus into a different type of relationship with time: a relationship where we stop being too busy to be healed (of hurry-sickness and of so many other things that keep us bound in habits that don’t lead to wholeness), and begin to say “no” to certain things so we can say “yes” to a more loving life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life because hurry kills our capacity for love.
Take a moment to consider your schedule. How “hurry sick” are you? Where are you finding yourself dependent on rushing, on “shallow work,” on distraction? What might it look like for you to separate yourself from your dependence on distraction this week?
Creator’s Note: So many other authors have written about this topic, but the one who inspired some of the structure and content of these sessions and articles was John Mark Comer and his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
