Road Runner Christianity
September 28, 2008
The first cartoon I ever saw (no cartoons in Lebanon where I grew up) was Road Runner frustrating the living Acme out of the Coyote who tried heroically to out speed him for a few ounces of meat on spindly bones. Road Runner always outsmarted Coyote and “out sped him. These two did life with dizzying speed. Road Runner could put it in overdrive anytime he saw danger approaching from Coyote. I was impressed with the cartoon. I watched it every Saturday morning. But then I was only 19 years old. Overexposure worked!
Richard Foster was interviewing John Ortberg on a series they were doing on the disciplines of the Christian life. Ortberg answered one of Richard’s questions about how to devote some time to the practice of the disciplines. Ortberg remembered Dallas Willard’s best advise to him: “Be ruthless with eliminating hurry from your life.” Ortberg swears by this advice as one which saved his life as he stepped out of the boat of hurry!
Is yours a Road Runner life in Christ? If inventory were taken of your schedule would there be any need to declare a missing road runner mentality from your life? At missional order we are committed to a slower life. We will struggle together with you in eliminating hurry from our lives. All of us are succeptible to hurry and eliminating it from our lives, if desirable, must be done intentionally. There will times of concentrated road runner hurry in our lives. Too much of it and danger lurks in the shadows of our paths.
The last 24 hour road runner schedule I’ve been guilty of (they say confession is good for the soul).
Saturday: 5:30 drive to Kansas City from Topeka to speak at a newly formed Arabic Congregation (70 miles). The preacher was long winded and the meeting which started at 7 didn’t get out until 9:30 or so. Home by 10:30 or so (70 miles). I gained three minutes of time by setting the cruise at 75 miles an hour. From about 10:30 till midnight I prepared for preaching the following day. I did some reading in Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care (a great resource, by the way) and prayed through many of the issues I was reading about. Copmline followed.
Sunday morning I finished a sermon I was going to preach later in the day on Sunday. Hurried through morning prayer. I pricelined a hotel room in Wichita for the night. Went to Sunday School at 9:30, left to preach in Topeka at 10:30. Came home at 12:30, ate lunch, and packed to go to Wichita to preach at a great international church at 4:00. Got out by 6. Supper at PF Chang in Wichita. Read through a couple of articles while eating on a topic I am writing about for a counseling course I am taking (OK, if you must know it’s about religious obsession or scrupulosity). Now I am writing this post about how not to hurry life from my hotel room! Will do compline just before bed.
OK, don’t cry for me people. No one to blame but hurry itself. The tyranny of the urgent is a disease and we need help with the remedy. I admit that there are seasons of life when hurry seems inevitable. God gives grace and mercy. But let’s not play with fire. Can a man hide fire in his bosom and not be burned?
So here are my top 5 quick tips (just kidding with the quick) on how to eliminate hurry from your life:
1…
2…
3…
4…
5…
Help! Should I call the ACME for a package of 5, add water and see what sprouts up? Or do you have any suggestions on how you have eliminated hurry from your life?
If you find you have to squeeze a sacred rhythm in, need time to focus on continuous spiritual formation, live missionally daily, and hold a full time job, you should call Willard and demand a recant on his advice to Ortberg!
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Georges, just reading your weekend schedule makes me very tired.
Two books that I found helpful several years ago were by Dr. Richard Swenson, who by the way is a believer, called “Margins: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives” and “The Overload Syndrome.” Both books emphasize the need to live with margins (like the white space around the written page of a book) in our lives. So much of the time we live our daily lives without margins, like the example with your weekend schedule.
How do we create margin? By learning to say “no”, making sure there is adequate time between our daily activities, and (as we hope this order will promote) creating a rhythm that will ensure that we “abide” before we “abound.”
Here is a funny word from Swenson and one of his books about how even our language speaks to the hurry in our lives:
“We are so addicted to speed and hurry even our language reflects this preoccupation, so our language in our day is marked by phrases like time crunch, fast food, rush hour, frequent flyer, rapid transient, we send packages by Federal Express, we use a phone company called Sprint, pay our bills with Quicken, diet with Slim Fast and swim in trunks made by Speedo.”
BTW, I don’t know about you but I don’t wear trunks made by Speedo
Thanks for the advice, Brad. Read both of these good books. Thankfully, I don’t keep that kind of a schedule all the time. Some time it is inevitable, it seems. Mostly I am more sane that my last 36 hours.