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 pastors may drive, eat, drink coffee, listen to tapes for sermon ideas, shave or apply make-up, direct church business on the car phone—all at the same time. Or they may try to watch TV, read Leadership, eat dinner, and carry on a phone conversation simultaneously.
Clutter. Take a look at your desk. One researcher noted that the average desk-worker has 36 hours worth of work on the desk, and spends three hours a week just sorting through it.
The hurry-sick lack simplicity. They often carry around a time organizer the size of Montana.
Do you find yourself subscribing to too many journals and then feeling guilty because you can’t read them all? Ever buy time-saving devices or Bible-software programs and then fail to use them because you don’t have the patience to go through the instructions?
Sunset fatigue. We come home after work, and those who need our love the most, those to whom we are most committed, end up getting the leftovers. This is part of what author Lewis Grant calls “Sunset fatigue”—all those end-of-the-day behaviors that signal hurry sickness:
- You rush around at home even when there’s no reason to.
- You speak sharp words to your spouse and children, even when they’ve done nothing to deserve them.
- You hurry your children along. You set up mock races (“Okay kids, let’s see who can take a bath fastest”), which are really about your own need to get through it.
- You tell your family that everything will be okay in just a week or two. A pastor friend says how, in a busy season, he found himself living for “two weeks from Tuesday” because then his schedule would lighten up, at least for a few days. But he realized this had become a way of life. He was always living for “two weeks from Tuesday.”
- You indulge in self-destructive escapes: watching too much TV, abusing alcohol, or scanning www.hotsex.com.
- You flop into bed with no sense of gratitude and wonder for the day, just fatigue.
Love impaired. The most serious sign of hurry sickness, though, is a diminished capacity to love. For love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.
When I get hurried, I begin to resent the very people I’m supposed to minister to. Somebody told me about a cartoon in which a pastor is talking on the phone while looking at his calendar: “No, Thursday won’t work for me. How about Never? Is Never good for you?”
I also start thinking about the people of my church in strictly utilitarian terms: how can I get work out of them? I use them instead of love them.
—John Ortberg
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us
