THE RUTHLESS ELIMINATION OF HURRY:
How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually
alive in the chaos of the modern world
By John Mark Comer
Hodder & Stoughton. 304 pages. £14.99.
ISBN 978 1 529 308 389
Let’s get this out there from the start: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (TREoH) is a great little book.
I don’t feel easy with books that tell me to do less. I read another book of that sort recently which felt rushed and ranty, and didn’t ‘work’. This book is the opposite of that. So if you are the sort of person who gets told to slow down a lot (irritating isn’t it?) … this one’s for you and for me.
Just what we need right now
Given that James Suzman’s Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time was published on 3 September by Bloomsbury, and the whole issue of time management is about to loom up in the public discourse with a return to hunter-gathering being touted as the solution to our hurriedness, this book of Comer’s could be just what we need right now to focus our own thinking more Biblically and to pass us ‘the goods’ for our witness in our workplace to our friends.
Part One of Comer’s book deals with the problem, Part Two deals with the solution (a rule of life… no, you need to read it) and Part Three deals with the application of the first two parts. You can see from this description that TReOH is a no-nonsense sort of book.
Written from experience
Another real strength is that the author’s style gently suggests he’s dealt with the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry in his own heart and soul – a journey he credits to the mentoring he received from John Ortberg and Dallas Willard. John Mark Comer seems to have learned well and has in real life acted on the lessons learned by changing the entire structure of his ministry. It shows. The book has the ring of truth about it – this feels like integrity in print.
One minor quibble would be that the first part of the book analyses the way time has become a tyrant across the ages, attributing a lot to the impact of the digital age, but neglects the impact of industrialisation.
Time and Motion missing
Neither is there mention of the genesis of the Time and Motion Study, the introduction of timesheets to the work place or the impact of the rise in consultancies charging by the half hour and allotting costs to headings that are audited against visible and tangible outcomes for the client.
The effect of this omission is to exaggerate the impact of the sudden arrival of the iPhone in 2007 and the thunderous dawn of the digital era. Nevertheless, the work Comer has done is interesting, thoughtful and generally looks well researched. This inner-urban pastor from Portland, Oregon, is to be forgiven for overlooking the impacts of industrialisation – we are all creatures of our own world and culture, and the fundamental issues addressed in this book cross our cultural boundaries.
Previous books in the Comer canon are: My Name is Hope (Graphe Publishing 2012) about anxiety and depression, drawing deeply on his own experience; Loveology (Zondervan 2014) which is a frank book about sex for bright young things; Garden City (Zondervan 2015), an exposition of work and human purpose from Genesis 2 aimed again at the 20–30-year-olds amongst us but definitely useful beyond that demographic too; and God has a Name (Zondervan 2017), a detailed exposition of Exodus 34:6-8.
Comer’s website offers a free-download PDF workbook to help us think through the four disciplines he highlights in Part Three of TReOH (the ‘application’ section of the book). This resource is really to be recommended and looks to me as if it would be very useful in a book club, small group, house group or whatever – whether its members have stumped up the nigh-on £15 to buy this book or not.
I didn’t expect to enjoy this book, and I almost never encourage my wife to read a particular book I’ve found useful because our reading tastes are very different. But her birthday is coming up and, 15 quid or not, I’m definitely buying her this one!
