Jump directly to the Content

Diagnosing Hurry Sickness

Here are some symptoms.

Speeding up. You are haunted by the fear that you don't have enough time to do what needs to be done. You try to read faster, lead board meetings more efficiently, write sermons on the fly, and when counseling, you nod more often to encourage the counselee to accelerate.

You chafe whenever you have to wait. At a stoplight, if there are two lanes and each contains one car, you read the year, make, and model of each car to guess which will pull away most quickly.

At a grocery store, if you have a choice between two check-out lines, you note the number of people in each line and multiply this number by the number of items per cart. If the alter-you leaves the store while you're still in line, you feel depressed.

Multiple-tasking. You find yourself doing or thinking more than one thing at a time. Psychologists call this polyphasic activity (it could be called doing-more-than-one-thing-at-a-time, but that would take too long).

The car is a favorite place for this. Hurry-sick ...

March
Support Our Work

Subscribe to CT for less than $4.25/month

Homepage Subscription Panel

Read These Next

Related
Skye Jethani: Recipe for Church-365 (Part 4)
Skye Jethani: Recipe for Church-365 (Part 4)
What if your church gave volunteers, leaders, and money to other churches' ministries- on purpose?
From the Magazine
The Evil Ideas Behind October 7
The Evil Ideas Behind October 7
The Hamas attacks in Israel have a grotesque ideological history and deserve unflinching moral judgment.
Editor's Pick
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
Understanding God and our world needs more than bare reason and experience.
close