Simply mentioning the name Jesus calls to mind an array of images: The kind-eyed carpenter with brown hair, selfless healer wearing a robe and sandals, humanity’s savior with hands nailed to a cross. But how often do we think of Jesus the contemplative, slipping from the chaos of the moment to pray and spend time alone with God? As our downtime goes digital and time spins more rapidly than ever before, perhaps we need a reminder of Jesus’s eremos—his “quiet place” where he sought peace and presence. Pastor of Bridgetown Church John Mark Comer looks at the days and practices of Jesus Christ to remedy the habit of hurry pushing our culture toward complacency and to refresh our spiritual lives with the authentic, restorative peace emulated in the life of Jesus.

How often do you check your watch in the middle of a conversation? Does time ever feel like a prison warden at your back, pushing you forward, stealing your energy, joy, and sanity? The frenzy of busyness is common to everyone in our modern age, but it’s more than a harmless rush to and from work, school, or events. Spiritual thinkers and psychologists recognize the impending dangers to a society that simply cannot slow down—emotional, relational, and spiritual disintegration. Thinkers like Dallas Willard, John Oltberg, and Carl Jung pose that our most pressing temptation today isn’t immorality but simply being busy, littering our days with distractions from scrolling to binge-watching to just over-scheduling ourselves.

According to historians, the evolution of time as we feel it now began in 1370 when Cologne, Germany welcomed the first clock tower, a move that ushered in our modern habit of ignoring the rhythms of our bodies to maximize the mechanical tick of a clock. Prior to Edison’s creation of the lightbulb in 1879, the average American slumbered a dreamily long 11 hours every night. Gradually, technology shrunk our time, and in 2007, it shattered time altogether as the screen of the first iPhone blinked to life. The flicker of its fantasmic glow greets us: Welcome to the digital age. While our devices, social media profiles, and favorite TV series may seem like harmless amusements or even efficient time savers, they fuel a culture with a dangerous habit of hurrying from one thing to the next.

In a society fed by this kind of constantly distracted and fragmented time, psychologists introduced “hurry sickness” into medical terminology, a disease associated with time-induced anxiety and the compulsion to move more rapidly in a literal (and imagined) race against the clock. According to psychologists Rosemary Sword and Philip Zimbardo, some symptoms of this illness include habits like rapidly changing checkout lines if one looks emptier, numbering the cars ahead of you to find the most efficient lane, or doing so many tasks at once that you inevitably lose track of one. Unfortunately for us, we’ve all been there. 

Think of the experience of riding in the passenger seat of a quickly moving car, staring out the window to see the shapes of reality blur and blend into indistinguishable forms—distortions of what’s real. This is the kind of life so many of us live. Unnecessary busyness destroys our spiritual lives as it corrodes our ability to recognize God’s presence in the moment, making joy, peace, and gratitude in our relationship with him and with those around us impossible.

As the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” If our attention is constantly torn, hopping from one obligation to the next, our relationship with God falters. Renewal begins when we halt the shrieking speed of life, pull the car over, and step out of the passenger side to simply look, listen, and wait for God. He will set the pace for us.

Amid the distraction-filled pace of modernity, our identity, purpose, and life itself grow mute. Our sense of self is muddled by endless streams of curated vacation photos, the newest Netflix series, and that relentless inbox of emails. Writer Charles Chu found that the average American scrolls social media for approximately 705 hours every year—hundreds of hours, minutes, seconds of our lives ticking off as we glare into the thin surface of a screen. Reality revolves beyond that smooth surface of glass we hold in our hands. To glimpse this true reality, we need only look up, toward Jesus, his words, and his daily life.

While the teachings of Jesus are taught widely throughout Christian culture, oftentimes the instruction modeled by the way he lived is forgotten. In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus teaches, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” This verse is incredibly inviting to distraction-weary believers, but how many of us truly take Jesus’s yoke upon us? And hold on—what even is a “yoke”? 

Among many things, Jesus lived as a rabbi, or a teacher with a group of followers who sought to model their lives on his. First century listeners would have recognized Jesus’s invocation of a yoke as a reference to the popular expression for the way rabbis taught the Torah. Essentially, Jesus entreats us to take up his yoke, or his instructions for simple, everyday living. Moreover, as a rabbi, Jesus also had disciples, or followers called in Hebrew, talmidim. Interestingly, this word can also be translated to “apprentices,” a label the author uses frequently to emphasize the calling every Jesus follower has to inculcate his habits on a practical basis. As followers, or apprentices of Jesus, we must look at his life as a model to instill peace, joy, and gratitude within our own souls. To state the obvious: Jesus may have been on to something.

Think about it. Jesus was interrupted on a daily basis, but not once did he ever snap at any of the people who came to him—from the woman who grazed the hem of his cloak to the anxiety-stricken father Jairus, Jesus overflowed with endless patience, peace, and understanding for all who came to him. How did he do it? Even in the midst of a bustling culture, Jesus cultivated a calm awareness of God’s presence and the eternal significance of every individual. 

Don’t fret if you freaked out on your kids this morning or snapped at your spouse after work. You’re just caught up in the rough-and-tumble chaos of the hurried world. Jesus has a few ways for us to learn from him as talmidim and slip from the noise of our perpetually frantic lives—follow him to the eremos, his “wilderness,” the “quiet place.”

Greeting the day in silence may sound like an unattainable ideal—listening to the waking sounds of morning over a cup of coffee and a Bible passage is difficult if you’re a parent with four kids, a full-time job, and a daily commute to trek. But even a small five or 10 minutes of quiet are essential to centering ourselves within our spiritual lives in order to maintain peace and awareness within the flurried existence of everyday living. In fact, it lays the soil for our spiritual health as the most integral component of the “spiritual disciplines,” or daily, practical habits that enable us to grow aware of God’s presence in all things. Quiet is a rare commodity in our culture, and for that reason, we need more solitude than ever before.

Following his baptism in Matthew 3, Jesus didn’t immediately venture out to towns and villages healing the sick and comforting the suffering. Instead, he headed straight into the desert, or the eremos, a word that translates from the Greek to “desert,” “quiet place,” or “wilderness.” While there, he was tempted by Satan, but this wasn’t just a strategic, crafty move on the part of the enemy to usurp Jesus at his lowest point. Rather, Jesus was moved by the Holy Spirit to enter the desert in order to gather strength in silence and solitude to defeat the enemy thereafter. Jesus incorporated this practice of centering himself throughout his entire life, as Luke 5:15-16 says that despite his increasing popularity, “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” Jesus’s eremos is mentioned countless times throughout the Gospels as a source of morning refuge to be alone with the Father in quiet.

Silence is both comforting and restorative—silence in the presence of God is life changing. Augustine called his own experience of quiet as “entering into joy,” and Mother Theresa advised the priest Henri Nouwen to spend an hour a day in the solitude of God’s presence. Without time to recenter ourselves in silence and solitude, distractions will pile onto the soil of our lives and erode the spiritual health and wellbeing we all hope to see flourish. If you’re having trouble, flying from one distraction to the next, endlessly shifting from one social media feed to another, caught in an endless, unfulfilling autoplay of podcasts, perhaps you need to return to your quiet place. 

The manic pace of our lives comes to a halt in the quiet place, the desert where we rediscover the truth of ourselves, the blessedness of the present, and the graciousness of God. As we allow God to chisel away our hurry in his presence, we recognize that life grows a bit less frazzled and we grow far more grateful and at peace. Whether it’s a nook beside your kitchen or a favorite backyard patio chair, make your eremos a place for constant guidance, a respite to renew your awareness of God’s constantly moving, always peaceful presence.

Plagued by 4,000 glowing advertisements a day, images of technicolor glamor and superficial joy, it’s no wonder our culture is drenched in discontent. When the things we want overcome who we are, we fall into anxiety, frustration, and sadness. As our discontent grows, we struggle even harder to get what we desire in a misguided attempt to purchase joy. Insatiable desire is an oft-mentioned and romanticized fact of human nature written about by thinkers as varied as Thomas Aquinas and Chance the Rapper. Unfortunately, this all-too-human trait has grown even worse in the advent of the digital age as our desires greet us everywhere we look. So what would Jesus say to us? What would he advise we do in a society swarmed by ads?

We stop, we give thanks, and we observe the Sabbath. The Hebrew word for Sabbath is Shabbat, which can be translated as “to stop” and “to delight,” and it comprises another of the spiritual disciplines. The commandment in Exodus 20:8 implores us to “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,” but keeping the Sabbath is much more than a ritualistic check on our religious to-do list. God modeled this recognition of rest and thankfulness in the creation of the world itself. In fact, in Genesis, along with blessing animals and humanity, God blesses the Sabbath. The author notes that this act implies the life-giving, creative power of the Sabbath. Science backs the Scripture too: Studies find that working more than 50 hours, roughly six days of work, is detrimental to productivity. Observing the Sabbath honors the way God made us as human beings who need rest, refreshment, and time in his presence.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann put it like this: “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.” By aligning our bodies to the pace God set for us from the beginning, the remainder of our days are infused with new energy, meaning, and enjoyment. Withdrawing from the heavy-handed bustle of consumerism and materialism grants us a sacramental reset to enjoy God and express our gratitude for our lives. When we stop and thank God for what we have, we place ourselves back into his hands and gather the strength to breathe peacefully.

Every Friday night, the author and his family put their schedules on hold, store their phones away, and circle around the family table to enjoy a home cooked meal and usher in the beginning of the Sabbath. On Saturday, the family simply enjoys the presence of God and each other, reading, walking, praying, and worshipping in whatever way the Holy Spirit leads them. 

Celebrating the Sabbath looks different for everyone—God finds us in what we love, and we grow grateful toward him as we practice these things, whether that’s a walk along a lake, prayerful time journaling, or thoughtful conversations with loved ones. Observing the Sabbath refocuses our attention toward God and overlays the rest of our days with a renewed sense of his presence.

God is found in the moment—our present awareness of his being reorients the way we live. While it's not a typical spiritual practice, the act of “slowing” is encouraged by Christian thinkers like John Ortberg and Richard Foster, who advise Christ followers to actively seek moments in which we’re forced to slip out of the manic frenzy of modern life to inhabit another one. Slowing life down unravels us to experience God’s presence afresh. Moving more slowly looks different for everyone, so we should find creative ways to decrease the pace of our own time in order to grow more cognizant of the presence of God in all parts of daily life, no matter how mundane.

The author proposes various ways we can loosen the bonds of speed from our lives and refresh ourselves with the slow. One method we can use to introduce slowness into our lives might hurt a bit at first. It may even hurt a lot for some of us, at least the 90% who admit to checking their phones as soon as morning arrives. Along with software developer Jake Knapp, the author suggests that we inculcate slowness into our lives by removing seemingly important, attention-stealing things from our phones like email, social media, web browsers, and notifications to essentially turn our devices into “dumbphones.” If this is too drastic, try setting time limits for checking your email or browsing social media feeds. Or you might want to consider simply shutting your phone off at a particular time every night to allow more distance for silence, rest, and space from fleeting distractions. A few simpler ways to slow the pace of your life include habits as easy (and necessary) as driving the speed limit, avoiding multitasking (since it really doesn’t work), or merely walking at a more contemplative pace. 

Imagine yourself strolling (slowly) along the stream of Psalm 23, endlessly present to the moment and God’s eternity therein. This is the reality God desires for us, to live in constant awareness of him and his love, whether that’s as we wait in a long checkout line at the grocery store, get stuck in reams of traffic along the highway, or take a day to stretch out beneath the sky he paints for us every morning. As culture sprints toward chaos, we are called to step back, to ponder the water in the stream, and to thank God for the way it flows slowly, thoughtfully, and peacefully. When we order our days as Jesus would, we unlatch ourselves from the rapidly rising momentum of life and renew our realities with joy.