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

The Intermission is a brief excursus in the middle of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, a pivot-point for the transition from theory to practice in between Parts 2 and 3. Though with considerably less text than the book’s chapters, it presents the reader with necessary information for understanding the advisements to come in Part 3.

Comer begins by observing that when we read biographies of great people whom we might wish to emulate, we often go looking for clues to their manner of life—their habits and choices that provided structure and direction to their exemplary lives—in order to then see if we can apply those patterns to anything in our own lives. Unfortunately, Comer notes, many people don’t read the biblical gospels that way, although they are also biographies. Readers of the gospels should pay attention to the details related there about how Jesus went about his daily life: “I would argue that these stories about the details of Jesus’ life have just as much to teach us about life in the kingdom as his teachings or miracles” (104).

Comer presents the patterns and habits of Jesus’s life as being the set of actions which Christians traditionally refer to as “spiritual disciplines” (See: Index of Terms). Rather than using the rhetoric of spiritual disciplines, however, Comer prefers to call them “practices of Jesus” (105), since they are not just a list of helpful advice, but actions rooted in Jesus’s own manner of life. These practices, Comer believes, do not just provide training for one’s willpower and character, but opens one up to God’s power in one’s daily life, and are thus able to effect deep-rooted change in a way that we cannot do on our own strength alone. The practices of Jesus are not, then, an exercise in willpower or self-discipline, but the acceptance of an invitation to slow down and open ourselves up, providing time and space for God’s work in our lives to grow and bear fruit.

The Intermission is a striking section of the book, not only because of the unique role it plays in the pivot from Part 2 to Part 3, but because it is printed in a different style than the other chapters. Its text is in a much larger font and with a switch in the primary shades, moving from black text on white pages in the other chapters to white text on black pages in the intermission. This serves to draw attention to the Intermission as distinctive, using the elements of the book’s printing to invite readers to focus on the points Comer is making, without which they might misunderstand the advisements of Part 3. The stylistic presentation of the text, then, underscores its importance in the work as a whole, further developing the thematic idea of Apprenticeship to Jesus to the point where Comer can begin laying out specific patterns of behavior to fit the theoretical framework he established in Part 2.