Message from Tim

Holiday Reading

Sue and I were glad and relieved to be able to get away to Bridport in Dorset for just over a week in the summer. We agreed this would be a ‘boots and books’ break. In the event, we did a few short walks, sat on the beach for a bit and got badly burnt (though it was nowhere near as hot down there as it was in Sussex), while I read two books and finished off a couple more. Unusually for me, my holiday reading was non-fiction, and I thought I might share some reflections on my reading this week, and perhaps in the weeks to come.

One book I intentionally read was kindly given to me by Clive Urquhart at Kingdom Faith – he told me it could change my life. I don’t think it did, but it did make me reflect. It was The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, by John Mark Corner, a successful church leader in the States who found he was getting totally stressed out, and out of this experience wrote this book on ‘how to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world’. It is very American in tone and style, but Corner, who was working on a doctorate in spiritual formation when he wrote it, can distil a wide range of academic and cultural voices into a readily accessible format.

Some of the book passed me by because I have never really got into social media (I’m an old dog reluctant to learn new tricks), and Corner perceptively highlights the way in which social media demands and distracts our attention – even I have to admit to being sidetracked by notifications on my phone or checking the live reports of the cricket from time to time. Of the 10 symptoms of ‘hurry sickness’ listed by Corner, Sue tells me I only suffer from irritability (which I do). The other symptoms are hyper-sensitivity, restlessness, workaholism or non-stop activity (I am a bit of a recovering addict from this), emotional numbness, out of order priorities, lack of care for my body, escapist behaviours, slippage of spiritual disciplines and being disconnected from God and others. Corner’s prescription for this disease involves seeking silence and solitude, practising sabbath rest, pursuing simplicity rather than materialism and just finding ways of slowing down.

What I brought away from the book is the value of inhabiting the moment, making the most of the present. I have never been very good at this. When my family took me as a boy to Battersea Fun Fair, they complained that I never really enjoyed whichever ride I was on because I was always looking forward to the ride after that. I studied Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King for A Level, a book in which the main character is driven all the time by this inner voice that says, ‘I want… I want… I want…’ and I remember thinking that my faith was an antidote to being driven by that inner sense of lack or need. But even so, sometimes it is easy, instead of counting my blessings, to ponder what I wish I had, or what I wish I had done or could yet do. For Corner the big lesson is learning to accept both who I am, and who I am not, recognising that, ‘All the best stuff is in the present, the now.’

That’s all very well for him, you might say – he has the best part of his life ahead of him, and he needs to learn how important it is not to neglect the present in a headlong rush into the future. He needs to learn how to resist the corrosive effects of being driven by the desire for something more or better. It is far harder for those of us who know that the best years lie in the past, or whose lives have been thrown into complete chaos by the events of this year. But regret can be as destructive as desire when it comes to our wellbeing. Regrets over what did not happen, or over what might have been, have the power to steal away our capacity to find any kind of contentment in the present (check out what Paul wrote while in prison in Phil. 4:11-13), to discover the goodness and mercy of God that follow us every single day of our lives. Sometimes God calls us to change the world; sometimes he calls us to accept the world as it is, not as we would have it be. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it in his prayer, ‘May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen’