The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

The next practice of Jesus which Comer enjoins is that of simplicity, based both on Jesus’s lifestyle and on his many teachings on how to live regarding wealth and possessions. Before defining what he means by simplicity, Comer offers a historical retrospective on the way that commercialism has reshaped Western life throughout the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

As the United States moved out of a predominantly agrarian economy, powerful forces in politics and media pushed the culture in the direction of a consumer-based economy. This has resulted in a way of life that is geared toward the accumulation of possessions, and this in itself, Comer states (quoting Alan Fadling), is “an engine for hurry” (190). The race to have the next new thing drives the momentum of one’s life, and since there is always another new thing coming down the line, that momentum never abates.

This style of living, however, is in direct contrast with how Jesus lived and taught in the gospels. Comer believes that Jesus’s teachings are not only good in an abstract moral sense, but that they faithfully relate the fundamental operating principles on which the universe runs.