A poem(?) inspired by John Mark Comer’s sermon series & book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
We never begin
We never rest
We never sit,
Ponder the sky
Understand the trees.
Because time is precious,
Too precious to invest in
What stands through the years,
What is valuable
At the end of our existence.
We invest in momentary satisfaction,
What gives us worth
For a moment.
The truth is,
The elimination
Takes the most time,
To settle,
To break from the hurry,
The motion,
The noise.
Yet the first part of the process
Of the elimination
Is most necessary.
Soon,
In a week
In a year,
After a month of up & downs,
Soon the smallest trace of hurry
Will taste sour in your mouth
Will shake your bones
And you will say
“Never again.”
Soon.
Today, you begin.
You begin by
Sleeping ten minutes longer.
Tomorrow, you begin again.
And this time
You’ll read ten minutes later.
And the next day,
You will find
Time in the day to walk.
But today,
As many times as is necessary,
You begin again and again.
This is why
They call it ruthless.
There can be no mercy
For the hurry that takes from life,
That robs love,
That stunts creativity.
For it has no mercy on you.
So today,
Walk, don’t run,
And begin the elimination
One steady step at a time.
“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do & how we love to be... Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically… To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it, rested we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest we reestablish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.”