The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

Prologue: Autobiography of an epidemic

It’s a Sunday night, 10:00 p.m. Head up against the glass of an Uber, too tired to even sit up straight. I taught six times today—yes, six. The church I pastor just added another gathering. That’s what you do, right? Make room for people? I made it until about talk number four; I don’t remember anything after that. I’m well beyond tired—emotionally, mentally, even spiritually.
When we first went to six, I called up this megachurch pastor in California who’d been doing six for a while.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“Easy,” he said. “It’s just like running a marathon once a week.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Click.

Wait . . . isn’t a marathon really hard?

I take up long-distance running.

He has an affair and drops out of church.

That does not bode well for my future.

Home now, late dinner. Can’t sleep; that dead-tired-but-wired feeling. Crack open a beer. On the couch, watching an obscure kung fu movie nobody’s ever heard of. Chinese, with subtitles.

Keanu Reeves is the bad guy. Love Keanu. I sigh; lately, I’m ending most nights this way, on the couch, long after the family has gone to bed. Never been remotely into kung fu before; it makes me nervous. Is this the harbinger of mental illness on the horizon?

“It all started when he got obsessed with indie marital arts movies . . .”

But the thing is, I feel like a ghost. Half alive, half dead. More numb than anything else; flat, one dimensional. Emotionally I live with an undercurrent of a nonstop anxiety that rarely goes away, and a tinge of sadness, but mostly I just feel blaaah, spiritually . . . empty. It’s like my soul is hollow.

My life is so fast. And I like fast. I’m type A. Driven. A get-crap-done kind of guy. But we’re well past that now. I work six days a week, early to late, and it’s still not enough time to get it all done. Worse, I feel hurried. Like I’m tearing through each day, so busy with life that I’m missing out on the moment. And what is life but a series of moments?

Anybody? I can’t be the only one . . .

Monday morning. Up early. In a hurry to get to the office. Always in a hurry. Another day of meetings. I freaking hate meetings. I’m introverted and creative, and like most millennials I get bored way too easily. Me in a lot of meetings is a terrible idea for all involved. But our church grew really fast, and that’s part of the trouble. I hesitate to say this because, trust me, if anything, it’s embarrassing: we grew by over a thousand people a year for seven years straight. I thought this was what I wanted. I mean, a fast-growing church is every pastor’s dream. But some lessons are best learned the hard way: turns out, I don’t actually want to be the CEO/executive director of a nonprofit/HR expert/strategy guru/leader of leaders of leaders, etc.
I got into this thing to teach the way of Jesus.

Is this the way of Jesus?

Speaking of Jesus, I have this terrifying thought lurking at the back of my mind. This nagging question of conscience that won’t go away.

Who am I becoming?

I just hit thirty (level three!), so I have a little time under my belt. Enough to chart a trajectory to plot the character arc of my life a few decades down the road.

I stop.

Breathe.

Envision myself at forty. Fifty. Sixty.

It’s not pretty.

I see a man who is “successful,” but by all the wrong metrics: church size, book sales, speaking invites, social stats, etc., and the new American dream—your own Wikipedia page. In spite of all my talk about Jesus, I see a man who is emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow. I’m still in my marriage, but it’s duty, not delight. My kids want nothing to do with the church; she was the mistress of choice for dad, an illicit lover I ran to, to hide from the pain of my wound. I’m basically who I am today but older and worse: stressed out, on edge, quick to snap at the people I love most, unhappy, preaching a way of life that sounds better than it actually is.
Oh, and always in a hurry.

Why am I in such a rush to become somebody I don’t even like?

It hits me like a freight train: in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.

I don’t want this to be my life . . .

* * *

Fast-forward three months: flying home from London. Spent the week learning from my charismatic Anglican friends about life in the Spirit; it’s like a whole other dimension to reality that I’ve been missing out on. But with each mile east, I’m flying back to a life I dread.

The night before we left, this guy Ken prayed for me in his posh English accent; he had a word for me about coming to a fork in the road. One road was paved and led to a city with lights. Another was a dirt road into a forest; it led into the dark, into the unknown. I’m to take the unpaved road.

I have absolutely no idea what it means. But it means something, I know. As he said it, I felt my soul tremor under God. But what is God saying to me?

Catching up on email; planes are good for that. I’m behind, as usual. Bad news again; a number of staff are upset with me. I’m starting to question the whole megachurch thing. Not so much the size of a church but the way of doing church. Is this really it? A bunch of people coming to listen to a talk and then going back to their overbusy lives? But my questions come off angry and arrogant. I’m so emotionally unhealthy, I’m just leaking chemical waste over our poor staff.
What’s that leadership axiom?

“As go the leaders, so goes the church.”

Dang, I sure hope our church doesn’t end up like me.

Sitting in aisle seat 21C, musing over how to answer another tense email, a virgin thought comes to the surface of my mind. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere of thirty thousand feet, but I don’t think so. This thought has been trying to break out for months, if not years, but I’ve not let it. It’s too dangerous. Too much of a threat to the status quo. But the time has come for it to be uncaged, let loose in the wild.

Here it is: What if I changed my life?

* * *

Another three months and a thousand hard conversations later, dragging every pastor and mentor and friend and family member into the vortex of the most important decision I’ve ever made, I’m sitting in an elder meeting. Dinner is over. It’s just me and our core leaders. This is the moment. From here on, my autobiography will fall into the “before” or “after” category.
I say it: “I resign.”

Well, not resign per se. I’m not quitting. We’re a multisite church. (As if one church isn’t more than enough for a guy like me to lead.) Our largest church is in the suburbs; I’ve spent the last ten years of my life there, but my heart’s always been in the city. All the way back to high school, I remember driving my ’77 Volkswagen Bus up and down Twenty-Third Street and dreaming of church planting downtown. Our church in the city is smaller. Much smaller. On way harder ground; urban Portland is a secular wonderland—all the cards are against you down here. But that’s where I feel the gravity of the Spirit weighing on me to touch down.

So not resign, more like demote myself. I want to lead one church at a time. Novel concept, right? My dream is to slow down, simplify my life around abiding. Walk to work. I want to reset the metrics for success, I say. I want to focus more on who I am becoming in apprenticeship to Jesus. Can I do that?

They say yes.

(Most likely they are thinking, Finally.)

People will talk; they always do: He couldn’t hack it (true). Wasn’t smart enough (not true).

Wasn’t tough enough (okay, mostly true). Or here’s one I will get for months: He’s turning his back on God’s call on his life. Wasting his gift in obscurity. Farewell.

Let them talk; I have new metrics now.