Just Continue That Thought...

A thought by John Mark Comer from his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (p. 72). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) Time, it’s so important how we use it, isn’t it? He says, “Apparently, I’m known as a ‘reader.’ I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed, we could all read two hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours. “Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends on social media each year? The number is 705 hours.   TV…2,737.5 hours. “Meaning, for just a fraction of the time we give to social media and television, we could all become avid readers to t

A thought by John Mark Comer from his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (p. 65). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) I’m ready for some good news, aren't you? Here it is. John says, “You. Can’t. Do. It. All.   And neither can I.” He then says, “We’re human . Time, space, one place at a time, all that pesky non-omnipresent stuff.   We have limitations. Lots of them.” Later he says, “What if these limitations aren’t something to fight but to gratefully accept as a signpost to God’s call on our souls? I love Peter Scazzero’s line: ‘We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.’ “Don’t misread me: the same is true for our potential. My language here could easily be manipulated or misinterpreted to say something that is at best un-American and at worst unjust. “But I doubt Jesus’ agenda is to make poor people middle class or middle-class people wealthy. Jesus blessed t

A thought by John Mark Comer from his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (p. 62). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) I don’t think that is the solution either. John says, “It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters. “You have all sorts of sharp, secular thinkers like Greg McKeown and Joshua Fields Millburn writing about essentialism and minimalism, which is great. I eat those books up. But these ideas are what followers of Jesus have been saying for millennia … Think about Genesis, the opening book in the library of Scripture. Our defining narrative says that we’re made ‘in the image of God,’ (Genesis 2:27) but also: we’re made ‘from the dust.’ (Genesis 2:7)” He goes on, “Image and dust. “To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential. We have the Divine’s capacity in our DNA. We’re like God. We were created to ‘image’ his behavior, t