The Weekly Word: America’s Number One Enemy

By Robert Williams, Lead Pastor at The Bridge Church

I’ve been reading a really good book with our small group recently. It’s called “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry,” by John Mark Comer. Have you read it? If not, I would highly recommend it.

It’s helped me realize that hurry is a constant pattern in my life, even after the COVID crisis of 2020 that forced so many of us to slow down.

I remember thinking this time last year: “Maybe this will teach us all to slow down a bit. Maybe this will force us to rethink our priorities. Maybe this will push us into less forced rhythms and more relaxed ones.” I’m afraid that I may have been wrong.

America is busy by nature. And too often we believe the lie that busyness equals productivity. Much of this has to do with the rapid pace of technology and global networking that has been enabled through the internet.

Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a great tool. But just like anything else, it can be used and abused for so many of the wrong reasons…

A man named Nicholas Carr put it this way:

“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

The worst part of it all? Smartphones now give us constant contact to the internet. Studies have been done where the research found that the average iPhone user touches their phone more than 2,500 times a day!

And even worse than that, another study was done where it found that if we are even in the room with a smartphone, our problem solving skills and working memory capacity are reduced!

John Mark Comer makes one more astute/scary observation from this: “Cue a terrifying trend: Our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was 12 seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds.

“To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.

“Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.”

And for someone with ADHD, that’s enormously concerning to me!

When it comes down to it, I think we can all agree that all these things force us into a life of hurry. Comer would say that hurry is the No. 1 enemy to spiritual intimacy. But I would take that even a step further: Hurry is the enemy to intimacy, period.

So, what do we do?

I think the best way to address it is to take a page out of Jesus’ book. We need regular rhythms of slowing down. We need regular rhythms of shutting down. Believe it or not, your phone does have a power button! We need regular rhythms of prayer.

Jesus was really good at this. He, literally, had thousands of people vying for His attention on a regular basis, but he always made it a point to slow down… to get away… to breathe.

I had a friend last week tell me that she and her husband decided to take tablets and screens away from their kids for the summer unless it was bad weather outside. She said she saw an immediate improvement in their behavior and life together. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Maybe it’s time we all did the same. Maybe it’s time we shut off our screens, and spent more time really with each other, and with our heavenly Father.