1 – Lord, You have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.
2 – Before the mountains were born or You brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting You are God.
3 – You turn men back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.”
4 – For…a thousand years in Your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
5 – You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning-
6 – Though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.
9 – All our days pass away under Your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.
10 – The length of our days is seventy years…or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
12 – [So] Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
14 – Satisfy us in the morning with Your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
16 – May Your deeds be shown to Your servants; Your splendor to their children.
17 – May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us-yes, establish the work of our hands.
One of the scariest books I’ve ever read was The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston. If you’ve read it then you know that among other things….it describes an outbreak of the Ebola virus that almost occurred at Fort Detrick…which is a few miles north of here in Frederick, MD. This was an airborne version of that virus that kills nine out of ten people who are infected. I believe this book inspired the making of the movie Outbreak which starred Dustin Hoffman. I saw the movie before I read the book….and was entertained but not frightened because I knew it was a work of fiction.
But the book DID disturb me a great deal-because it is NON-fiction….the events it describes really happened. Tens of thousands of people in our area would have died if this bug had indeed gotten loose. I remember Preston telling in his book how scientists like those at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta are constantly on the look out for new deadly viruses like ebola that could start an uncontrollable world-wide plague…killing millions.
Well, this morning I want to take a few moments to WARN you of a new disease that-in spite of the valiant efforts of the CDC-is spreading like wild fire across our nation even as we speak. It has come to be referred to as “hurry sickness” and it has already infected millions of people in our country….in fact I would venture that many of us here in this room this morning are, at this very moment, afflicted with this ailment.
I believe Meyer Friedmann, co-author of Treating Type A Behavior, was the first to talk about this disease and he decribes it as, “a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time…” And, from my pastoral observations of human behavior in Montgomery County, I would say that “hurry sickness” has already reached epidemic proportions-because, for so many of us, HURRY has become a lifestyle.
Think about it…..we buy anything that promises to help us live in haste. Almost all brands of shampoo these days comes with conditioner already in it….eliminating one “rinse” from your hair washing cycle. Nowadays bath tubs are rarely used simply because we don’t have the time to sit and soak.
Instead we grab a quick shower in the morning before running out the door. Our grocery store aisles are stocked with dozens of varieties of instant food-because we rarely have the hours in our hectic schedules required to make and serve a home cooked meal. In fact we use our microwaves these days much more than we do our stoves or ovens.
We get so many BIG MAC ATTACKS….not because the food at Mickey D’s is good or even cheap but because its FAST. And to speed up meal time even more, almost all fast food restaurants now even have a drive through so you don’t have to waste all that time parking the car and sitting down inside to eat. You probably remember that Domino’s became the number one name in pizza because their company promised to deliver in thirty minutes or less. When asked to comment on this their CEO said, “We don’t sell pizza. We sell delivery!” A few years ago USA TODAY reported, “Taking a cue from Domino’s Pizza, a Detroit hospital guarantees that emergency room patients will be seen within 20 minutes or treatment is free.” The paper noted that since the offer was made, “business” has been up 30 percent at that hospital.
In his book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted (which I have relied on heavily today), John Ortberg writes, “Our world has become the world of the Red Queen in ALICE IN WONDERLAND. [Remember what she said to Alice?] ‘Now HERE, you see, it takes all the RUNNING you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least TWICE AS FAST as that!'”
And we ARE constantly running…..always hurrying….from place to place. In our society we value motion and hold up busyness as a special sign of significance. We say things like, “Oh, you’re so busy. You must be important.” I don’t believe that any culture has ever tried to negotiate a faster paced lifestyle than ours. It used to be that if you missed the stagecoach, it didn’t matter, because there would be another one next week but now even a few minutes delay drives us into depression or anxiety.
Sometime ago a newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, carried the story of Tattoo the basset hound. Tattoo didn’t intend to go for an evening run one day, but when his owner accidentally shut his leash in the car door and took off for a drive, Tattoo had no choice. A motorcycle officer named Terry Filbert noticed a passing vehicle with something that appeared to be dragging behind it. When he got closer he saw Tattoo. Officer Filbert finally chased the car and caused it to stop, and Tattoo was rescued-but not before the poor dog reached a speed of twenty to thirty miles per hour and rolled over several times. By the way, Tattoo has not asked to go out or an evening walk for a long time. I think many of us live lives like Tattoo. The fast-paced schedule of our culture pulls us along at speeds we weren’t meant to handle. And trying to maintain this mile-a-minute lifestyle harms us in many ways….
One way “hurry sickness” hurts us is through the damage it does to our RELATIONSHIPS.You see, when we rush around trying to do more than we should, we get so task-oriented that people become inconveniences.
We see someone coming and say, “Oh no, not them!” The phone rings and we cringe at the way it intrudes on our lives. Perhaps you’ve seen the poster that pictures a dad and his 7 or 8 year old son in an old rowboat on a little lake. It’s early in the morning…there’s a faint mist still on the water, and the father and son are sitting there, quiet and still. They’re each holding bamboo fishing poles and the two corks attached to their lines are floating motionless on the placid water. Underneath the picture are two words:
“TAKE TIME.”
Well, people infected with hurry sickness are TOO BUSY to take time for people….even the people they say they love. Many marriages that WERE once healthy have been devastated by this disease. Lewis Grant states that one of the side effects of hurry sickness is what he calls “sunset fatigue.” Sunset fatigue is when we are just too tired, or too drained, or too preoccupied, to love the people to whom we have made the deepest promises. When we come home at the end of a hectic day’s work, those who need our love the most…those to whom we are most committed end up getting the left overs.
Hurry sickness can cause great relational damage….but…
….it also damages us EMOTIONALLY.Busy people often fall into the trap of trying to “hydroplane” over the surface of their emotions. They don’t have time to deal with things like feelings. You see love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is of course one thing hurried people don’t have.
But in this avoidance of emotions they forget how precious love really is. Ortberg tells the story of an elderly couple who were flying first class, sitting behind a hurried businessman who was enormously frustrated with them. They had been just ahead of him in line at the gate and again boarding the plane, and they moved slowly-enjoying the view-which was very upsetting to him since he was in such a hurry.
When the meal was served, they delayed the businessman again by having to get some pills from the overhead storage inadvertently dropping a battered duffel bag. When this happened he exploded at them, yelling loud enough for everyone to hear, “What’s the matter with you people? I’m amazed you ever get anywhere. Why can’t you just stay home?” Then to further display his disgust, the man sat down and reclined his seat back as hard as he could-so hard that the elderly husband’s tray of food spilled all over him and his wife. The flight attendant apologized to the couple profusely and asked, “Is there anything I can do?” The husband explained it was their fiftieth wedding anniversary and they were flying for the first time. “Let me at least bring you a bottle of wine.” The flight attendant offered.
She did so. And…when it was uncorked, the old husband stood up, proposed a toast-and poured the entire bottle over the head of the impatient businessman sitting in front of them. And when he did this, everybody in the cabin cheered. People like this businessman rush through life so fast that they forget how wonderful love is…how priceless it is. They forget that it is definitely worth our time! So…..hurry sickness injures us relationally and emotionally and…
…it can even harm us physically.
You see….busy people usually don’t have time for regular exercise; they rarely have healthy eating habits or sleep habits. And burning the candle on both ends like this inevitably takes its toll on our bodies. In his new book, The Anxiety Cure, Dr. Archibald D. Hart comments on the dramatic rise in stress and anxiety-related disease in past years. He says that the reason that this is true is that we humans were designed for “camel” travel but we are acting like supersonic jets.
We are living at too fast a pace. Our frantic schedules cause adrenaline to flow as a continuous stream of supercharged, high-octane energy through our bodies. And, as with any vehicle running on high-octane fuel, we burn out quickly. The pace of modern life is stretching all of us beyond our limits. Life-style induced stress causes headaches, ulcers, and even heart disease. It also sets the stage for anxiety by wreaking havoc with our brain’s biochemistry. I think Jesus was warning us of this danger in Luke 21:34 when He said, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with….the anxieties of life…”
If we are not careful….hurry sickness can actually hurt us physically.
But you know….the worst effect of this “speed sickness” is seen in the damage it does to our SPIRITUAL MATURITY. Ortberg writes, “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life… for hurry prevents us from receiving love from the Father or giving it to His children. For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.”
You see hurry keeps God’s truth from taking root in our lives which of course dwarfs our spiritual growth. In His parable of the wheat and the weeds Jesus spoke of this when He said, “The one who received the seed that feel among the thorns is the man who hears the Word, but the worries of this life….choke it, making it unfruitful.” (Matthew 13:22 ) It is no wonder that Carl Jung wrote: “Hurry is not OF the devil; hurry IS the devil.”
During His earthly ministry Jesus often had much to do, but he never did it in a way that severed the live-giving connection between Him and His Father. He was never so busy that it interfered with His ability to give love when love was called for. Jesus was busy but never hurried. He constantly urged His disciples to take time out….to pray and in so doing keep their relationship to God strong. And if we are to follow Jesus-and in so doing become more like Him-we must slow down, because by definition we can’t move faster than the One we are following.
In Galatians 5:25 the Apostle Paul writes, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.” Psalm 27:14 says, “Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage but wait for the Lord!” (NASB) So, this new “disease” can do incredible harm to those who are infected. It damages their relationships with others. Their emotions are marred. It harms them physically and often they rush about so fast that even their spiritual growth comes to a halt because they don’t take time to be with God….to fellowship with Him.
Well to my knowledge there are no blood or urine tests to diagnose this illness. It can’t be picked up on an X-ray but Ortberg notes that there are several very recognizable symptoms that enable us to spot this disease and stop it before it gets out of control. So, if you are curious as to whether or not you indeed have hurried sickness, listen up.
- The first symptom is the practice of constantly SPEEDING UP DAILY ACTIVITIES.
This is seen in people who chafe at having to wait for anything. They want to hurry everything up because they fear if they don’t that they will simply not be able to get everything they need to get done…done! So…if you come to a stoplight on Shady Grove Road and there are two lanes and each contains one car and you find yourself guessing based on the year, make, and model-which one will pull away fastest, you may have hurry sickness. If you go to MacDonalds and always look closely to see which cashier is fastest and most efficient, you could be infected. At Price Club or Sam’s if you count how many people are in each line and the number of items in each buggy before you decide which line to stand in, you may have this illness. Advanced cases of hurry sickness cause you to even keep track of the person who would have been in front of you in the other line you thought of choosing. If the other person beats you-you are depressed…if you win, you’re elated…
- A second symptom is MULTIPLE-TASKING
This is when speeding up every day activities is not enough so we find ourselves thinking about or doing more that one thing at a time. It’s almost as if people with hurry sickness concentrate more on becoming human DOINGS than human BEINGS because they are always looking for ways to DO more. Psychologists refer to this as polyphasic activity and it is seen in people who eat or drink while they drive or talk on the phone while they drive or shave while they drive or apply make up during their morning commute. I suppose they think what rear view mirrors are for! My dad used to drive from Dover, Delaware to the Baptist Book store in Baltimore where he would purchase several books and then on the way home he would read two or three of them. I don’t know how he got across the Bay Bridge with all that polyphasic activity!
- A third symptom of this ailment is CLUTTER
The lives of hurry sick people lack simplicity. They carry around purses the size of laundry baskets or daytimers the size of Texas. They continually acquire stacks of books and magazines but feel guilty because they never have time to read them. They buy time-saving gadgets and don’t have the time or patience to read the instructions and learn how to use them. Their calendars are cluttered. They forget important dates and miss appointments.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I have all three symptoms and if you fear that you or one of your loved ones may be infected as well, let me tell you that this disease can be treated. There are several things (think of them as therapies) that can help us to slow down and in so doing rid ourselves of this disease.
1. The first is to SIMPLY NOT TAKE EVERYTHING IN LIFE SO SERIOUSLY.
You see, people who have this disease tend to worry too much. We need to realize that many of those things that seem so vital…those activities that we feel we must rush around doing every day… are not always worthy of our concern. Someone once wisely said, “worry is wasting today’s time cluttering up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.”
In Matthew 6:34 Jesus said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I think Jesus was inferring here that worry usually isn’t worth the effort….and it does require a great deal of effort. In fact, a day of worry is much more exhausting than a day of work.. In His omniscience, our Lord knows that most things we worry about never live up to their fear-causing power. Once recent survey indicated that 40% of the things we worry about never happen, 30% are in the past and can’t be changed, 12% concern the affairs of others and aren’t our business. 10% involve imagined sickness, which leaves only 8% to worry about. And most of the things we should worry about today cause us to laugh years later as we look back on them. In his book entitled, The Book of Failures Stephen Pile tells of something that happened in 1978 during the fireman’s strike in England.
The British Army had taken over emergency firefighting and on January 14 they were called out by an elderly lady in South London to retrieve her cat. They arrived with impressive haste, very cleverly and carefully rescued the cat, and started to drive away. But the lady was so grateful she invited the squad of heroes in for tea. They accepted and then as they were hurriedly leaving with fond farewells and warm waving of arms, they accidentally ran over the cat and killed it. You know — no matter how sincere we may be or how hard we may work, some days are best forgotten. And one thing we can do to cure this “hurry sickness” is to remember that some things that seemed terribly important and serious at the time become absolutely hilarious after a little time passes. They are NOT worth our running around like chickens with their heads cut off! So from time to time, slow down, stop — and ask God to give you a little perspective. Ask Him to help you “number your days aright” so you can see things as He sees them. And then a second therapy to use in the treatment of this ailment is to…
2. learn to practice THE ART OF SLOWING.
This involves simply cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we are forced to wait….to slow down. One would be to deliberately drive in the slow lane on I-270….force yourself to cruise at or beneath the posted speed limit. You may arrive 5 minutes later to work but you won’t be as angry at other drivers when you do. And, as cars fly by you utter a little prayer for them.
Ask God to bless them and keep them safe. Declare a fast from honking. For a week eat your food slowly. Force yourself to chew at least fifteen times before each swallow. When you go to Giant purposely choose the longest check-out line. Get in it and in fact let one or two shoppers person go in front of you. Spend the extra time praying for that busy grocery store clerk. Go through one day without wearing a watch and discard your digital watch that tells you the exact time down to the millisecond. Get one like I got for Christmas that has a real second hand and no numbers so that when you look at it you see that it’s “about twelve o’clock” which is much less stressful than 11:57:43AM!
My sister e-mailed me several prayers uttered by stressed out people. One went like this: “Lord, help me to relax about INSIGNIFICANT details…beginning tomorrow at 7:41:23AM, e.s.t.” Well, this list of “slowing suggestions” could go on but the idea is to find ways to deliberately choose waiting…ways that make hurrying impossible. It shouldn’t take a SNOW STORM to get us to stop and not feel guilty for doing so. We should regularly practice the art of slowing. And as we practice these techniques, we should pray to God and tell Him that we are trusting Him to enable us to accomplish all that we need to get done. Remember in Philippians 4 Paul said, “Don’t worry about anything…instead pray about everything!”
3. A third thing to do to help rid yourself of hurry sickness to JOURNAL.
This involves the daily practice of simply keeping a spiritual diary in which you..write down your experiences, observations, reflections, and prayers! In his book Ordering Your Private World Gordon MacDonald endorses this practice. He says that most of us live unexamined lives so we repeat the same errors day after day.
We don’t learn much from the decisions we make, whether they are good or bad. We don’t’ know why we’re here or where we’re going. And one benefit of journaling is that it forces us to slow down and examine our lives to counter this. You can begin journaling by going to THE DOLLAR STORE this afternoon and buying an inexpensive spiral notebook in which to write each day as part of your regular QT with God. If you’re like me you are thinking, “I don’t have time for this….I’m not a good writer…” But it’s not that big of a deal. Bill Hybels is a well-known journaler and he suggests that we limit our writing to one page and that we begin each entry with the word, “Yesterday….” Then follow this with a paragraph or two recounting yesterday’s events…sort of a post game analysis.
- Write whatever you want-perhaps a little description of the people you interacted with….your appointments, decisions, thoughts, feeling, high points, low points, frustrations…what you read in your Bible, what you were going to do and didn’t.
- An important part of journaling is to conclude your entry by writing a prayer to God and follow that up with a time in which you simply stop and listen to God. * Heed His command of Psalm 46:10 and “Be still”-listen! Remember in I Kings 19 Elijah learned that God was not in the whirlwind. He was in the still small voice and we need to stop and listen if we are to hear it.
The fourth way we can successfully treat this disease is to….
4. learn to FIND TIME FOR SOLITUDE
You know we are rarely alone these days. Pagers and cell phones and instant e-mail make that pretty much impossible and we need to be anole! Jesus engaged in solitude frequently. At the beginning of His ministry, He went to the wilderness alone for an extended period of fasting and prayer. He also went into solitude when he heard of the death of John the Baptist and when He was going to choose His disciples and after His followers had engaged in ministry.
This pattern continued into the final days of His life on earth, when again He withdrew into the solitude of the Garden of Gesthemane to pray. Jesus urged His disciples to practice solitude. In Mark 6:31 He said, “Come away with Me to a deserted place…” We need to heed His invitation from time to time to leave the rat race and be alone with God for an extended period of time. Solitude can come in two forms: brief periods on a regular basis (even daily) and extended periods — a day or a few days of solitude every few months. One reason to practice solitude is because it is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise mold us to their pattern.
Do you remember the story of the tests scientists did with frogs and hot water? They learned that if you put a frog in water that’s at room temperature and heat it slowly he will stay there until he boils to death. But if you put him in water that is already boiling he will hop right out. The truth is that the dangers to which we are most vulnerable are generally not the sudden, dramatic, obvious ones. They are the ones that creep us on us-that are so much a part of our environment that we don’t even notice them. And we do live in a lethal environment.
Our society is full of ideas and values and pressures and temptations that we will not even notice unless we withdraw every once in a while. In Romans 12:2 the apostle Paul put it this way, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.” In other words pull away from time to time and be transformed by God instead!
A few years ago a researcher found that it takes a high dose of amphetamines to kill a mouse living in solitude. But a group of mice will start hopping around and hyping each other up so much that a dosage twenty times smaller will be lethal. So great is the effect of the “world” on mice. In fact, a mouse that had been given no amphetamines at all, placed in a group on the drug, will get so hopped up that in ten minutes or so it will be dead. Well, in a very real sense, we live among “hopped up mice.” Our society constantly tells us to move faster…do more. And solitude can help cure this for it is basically time in which we leave and do nothing. Just as fasting means to refrain from food, solitude means to refrain from society.
We withdraw from conversation, from the presence of others, from noise, from the constant barrage of stimulation. Solitude helps us purge ourselves of the poisonous influences of our world and at the same time it gives us a precious opportunity to renew our relationship with God. A little girl once came home from VBS and proudly announced, “I asked Jesus into my heart.” Her mother said, “But honey, you asked Jesus into your heart two years ago.” She shrugged her shoulders and sighed, “I know. But He keeps escaping.”
This girl was partly right but the problem isn’t that He escapes as much as we force Him out with our hectic schedules. Solitude allows us to renew our friendship with Him and keep Him on the throne of our lives so that we can experience the peace He promised. But in order to experience this much-needed peace we must stay connected to Him.
God promises us peace but not in a program or a place but in a Person. Isaiah 26:3 says, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee.” And in John 15:4 Jesus said that the secret to purpose in life is our “abiding in Him.” We need times of solitude to abide in Him….to strengthen and renew our relationship with Him. Charles Swindoll warns, “We will not become men of God without the presence of solitude.”