Overcome Your Addiction to Unrighteous Hurry and Anxiety

One day the Lord reminded me through a whisper that I am never required to forfeit peace as a Christian and that whisper changed my life. Today, as a CBT certified coach, I help women all around the world in similar situations ditch worry and live in peace using practical strategies. Listen, life is messy. It’s full of hard decisions. And while hard times during everyday life will come, the good news is that they never have to overcome you.

position of peace vs the pool of panic

Modern-day mothers are often addicted to busy. Whether you are washing the dishes, you’re running out the door with young children to a soccer game, you’re making dinner or you’re doing anything mundane, this strategy is going to help you uncover whether or not you are doing it from a position of peace or if you’re in the pool of panic. And because we’re creatures of habit, it’s good to examine our daily life with an eye to our mental health so we don’t just aimlessly exist in survival mode. By spending time in prayer and with sufficient support, I believe these practical tips will help you!

the stopwatch and the timer

I want to tell you about the stopwatch and timer effect–this is a great way to illustrate operating from peace vs panic. When you open your clock app, you’ll see some different functions. One is a timer and one is a stopwatch. I want you to pull up the stopwatch first. And I want you to go ahead and hit the button that says start. Pay attention to how fast the stopwatch is moving, ok? Doesn’t it remind you of a race or even like a track meet?  Now I want you to shut down the stopwatch and go over to where it says the timer and click start. You can pick a time– 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, doesn’t matter. Pick one and then hit start.  Pay attention to how much slower the timer is. It’s definitely more relaxed compared to the stopwatch, right? I want to suggest to you that hurry can feel like the stopwatch and urgency can feel like the timer. 

God actually calls hurry haste. In Proverbs 19:22, he says that haste makes mistakes. When you are in a state of hurry, you feel like you are racing against the clock, whereas a state of urgency feels like a countdown to something. Hurry and urgency/the stopwatch and the timer operate simultaneously during life, right? Hurry isn’t all that bad. In Psalms, David is pleading with the Lord to make haste to rescue him. There are times when we do need to sprint, and there are times when we need to slow down. And this is even biblical. Haste makes mistakes.

And that is exactly where we’re going today. Because hurry, if it does make mistakes like the Bible says, has a counter and that’s urgency. Urgency is born out of a place of wisdom. When we hurry, we can make mistakes which stem from a place of I just have to get this done! There is a huge difference between the two.

the mom chant

There is a chant that most of us women are saying all day and it’s laced with mom guilt.

Something like…

I need to get the dishes done.

I need to sweep the house. 

I need to switch out the laundry. 

I need to, I need to, I need to….

Let’s say hurry is the stopwatch and it’s going fast. Urgency is the timer. It’s counting down really slow. I would like to suggest to you that there is righteous hurry and unrighteous hurry. So the stopwatch is not bad in and of itself, but how we use it is either righteous or unrighteous. And same with urgency. We are either in a place where urgency is righteous or it’s unrighteous. Unrighteous hurry is what we do when it’s time to get the kids off to school and they’re just dragging their feet, they don’t get out of bed, and you are hurrying them all morning and having a hard time getting out the door and then you end up losing your temper. How many of us have been there? I hope we’re all raising our hands right now, hahaha. This happens to the working mother and the stay-at-home mom alike. This is when your daily routine is dominated by stressful situations and your mind is in a place of hurry constantly. Some might even call this hurry sickness. 

Unrighteous hurry is being annoyed at the grocery store checkout line. Maybe it’s ten people deep and the checkout lady is just going really slow, taking her sweet old time and you are thinking to yourself, “This is not okay, I have places to be!!.” The warning signs are all there. You’re about to lose it. This is usually rooted in some kind of selfish ambition or fleshly desire to move things along quickly and make your life a bit more convenient. It’s really having to wait your turn for anything and then being rude about it. That’s a direct contradiction to what 1 Corinthians 13 says, by the way. 

Unrighteous hurry sometimes even looks like trampling hearts in order to look good. Let’s say you’re running late for church and you’re yelling at everybody and unrighteously hurrying people along and putting them on the stopwatch. And you’re doing it because you don’t want other people to see that you’ve arrived late or somebody else is depending on you and you don’t want to have to feel the discomfort of what they’re going to think when you’re late. Peace cannot breed in a hostile attitude like that. It’s an area of repentance for us all. 

hurry isn’t all bad

So what is righteous hurry then? Because there is a way to righteously hurry things along that would be pleasing to the Lord. This is the kind of hurry which has the motive behind it is to quickly get back to abiding in Christ.  Righteous hurry often looks like repentance. When I snap at my children or when I snap at my husband or I was rushing everybody to get out the door for church and I lost my attitude, a righteous hurry says make it right immediately. Repent. When I am running towards the Lord and making it right with Him and with them, it should happen quickly. Not the next day, but right away. This is the better way. I don’t want to have the timer going down slowly and me just waiting around to make it right with my people. I want to set the stopwatch and I want to time myself and I want to shorten the amount of time that I am having to make it right with them. When you’re in a hurry to deny your flesh, that is a very good thing. My prayer is to be a person who chooses to realign with God’s way and his word and his Holy Spirit hastily–or in a hurry. 

righteous urgency

Let’s talk about righteous urgency. So if hurry is the stopwatch, it’s going quickly, it’s getting off the starter block, and we’re timing this thing, then urgency is going be the timer. It’s going to be like a timer you set and you let that timer run down. It’s a slow, methodical place. This is the place where I like to live most of my life–righteous urgency. 

Righteous urgency is acknowledging the importance of six areas of life (faith, family, fitness, finances, field/calling/work, friendship) and acting on the priority these areas have in your life. It’s this urgent insistence that I’m going to engage with this every day at some level because this is important and it’s the ability to assess which area that we’re needing to tackle this season. Righteous urgency when it comes to finances is where you dig deep urgently to get better control of your spending habits and beliefs about money. Because of that I’m not going to sign up for the get rich quick scheme or even believe that that is worth my time and energy to explore.

The timer mentality is where it’s slow, methodical, and we understand that good growth takes time. We understand when we plant an apple seed, we don’t harvest apples until a year or two or three down the road. In fact, the best fruitfulness of those apple trees comes in 5 to 10 years when it’s really big and and mature and fruitful. That is the kind of demeanor that we engage with these six areas with when it comes to having a righteous urgency.

trusting the process

God says to ask for wisdom and you shall receive it, right?  We can be sure that even though we won’t have perfection until heaven, we definitely make a difference and we grow greatly on this side of heaven. You’re constantly learning and growing and you have a maturity that says there is no need to rush. Urgency is not rushing or hurrying. It is saying I have seed, I understand I need to plant that seed in good soil, and I need to water it, and I need to trust the process. I need to trust that God is leading me in this specific area and it will grow as I tend it, just like I have grown over all these years. 

Now, if we’re going to talk about righteous urgency, then you’re going to also have the flip side, which is unrestraint. There are times when the stopwatch approach is necessary and the timer approach is an inappropriate one. How it often shows up if you are in unrighteous unrestraint is it shows up in feelings of apathy or we’re afraid to engage with that particular area of our life and we’re paralyzed maybe by uncertainty of how to move forward. Sometimes we also need healing in that area. This shows up in dragging our feet in the timer state. 

And if urgency is the clock, then you are also able to see that it can be used as a double edged sword as well. It can be for your good and used in a righteous way or it can be used unrighteously. It can be used as a form of unrestraint, almost lazy, so to speak. And I find that when laziness shows up or apathy shows up with me, it’s usually because I don’t have a clear way forward. Instead of engaging with it from a position of peace, my panic is actually showing up with the form of disengagement and I actually pull away. 

the position of peace

Jesus said we’ll know them by their fruit, and so if you’re experiencing something like burnout, weariness, fatigue, or hopelessness that is the fruit of unrighteous action. Peace brings all the good. When you are moving from a position of peace, you will feel it. You will know it. It will feel really good and satisfying and you will experience relief and being in the zone of relief a lot more often.

When you are in the righteous stopwatch position, you’ll know it’s righteous when you are running toward abiding in Christ, when you’re quickly repairing relationships faster than ever before, when there is joy, delight, peace, patience, kindness, hope, and this is all in a supernatural speed. All the glory to the Lord when things turn around quickly because you are making moves while trusting the Lord. 

It’s important to know that whatever it is you’re working on right now that everything is as unto the Lord. So if you’re going to make moves quickly, if you’re going to make haste, make sure that it’s from a righteous position, and you’ll know if it’s righteous because it feels good. You’re experiencing the the fruit of the Holy Spirit when you are moving quickly.

And you’ll know also that when you are taking your time and you’re dragging your feet, that that can feel unrighteous at times, right? It’s this idea that there are two ways and two speeds that our lives are operating at. It’s either the stopwatch or it’s the timer and both are necessary and both are good. It’s how we engage with it that can help us determine whether or not we are living from a position of peace and we are moving in things from a righteous perspective or if we’re moving from an unrighteous perspective. How this will practically show up in your life today is understanding that maturity is knowing the difference between hurry and urgency. It’s being able to look at the stopwatch and say, yeah, I’m actually moving things along. I’m trying to make things happen quickly, but I’m not doing this from a righteous place while trusting the Lord. I am trying to do this on my own terms and with my own timeline–like a “good mom”– and I’m trying to bend and morph things into something that it’s not supposed to be.

pay attention

When you’re honest with yourself, you can tell whether or not you have that maturity and whether or not you’re allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you because he lives in you. He will definitely tell you which one you’re operating in and out of and whether or not it’s righteous or unrighteous. So over this next week, I want you to pay attention to how you’re showing up. There may just be subtle signs to pay attention to. Does it feel like stopwatch energy or does it feel like the timer energy?

And then the second question is, is it appropriate? Is it moving from a place of righteousness or is it coming from a place of unrighteousness? We think that everything rides on us. So we spend a lot of time hurrying and running around like a chicken with our head cut off and living from this stopwatch mentality. These are not healthy ways to operate–not for the long haul. The Lord is just really inviting you into this timer mentality to slow down and to really savor and also understand that he’s calling you to a season of wisdom where you’re going to know the difference between the two, you’re going to understand when it’s time to light a fire under your booty and get to work.

And you can do it as unto the Lord. It will be very good. And there are times, you know, we’ve got to slow down and really, really engage with all of the areas of life from a slower, more methodical and wise place. When we do that,  When we understand that it’s kind of like planting a garden, we can make better sense of it all. If my season is done here for the garden then I’m going to plan for next season. I’m not going to sit around and try to hurry and plant tomato seeds into the ground when I know it’s about to be winter. This is what I mean by time. You have a moment to slow down and turn your waiting season into a school room. 

knowing when to stroll and knowing when to sprint

I promise you, there are things that you are treating like a stopwatch that are supposed to be a timer and there are things that you’re treating like a timer where God is saying you need to turn on the stopwatch, especially if he has placed a desire in your heart that you still haven’t even planted a seed for yet. This is where the stopwatch is really helpful. It’s time to step in from a righteous perspective and get in there and do what God has called you to do.  It’s embracing your true self. When we are mature, we are powerful. This maturity is what living from a position of peace is like. It’s saying, I choose not to worry. There are seasons where I’m going to move a little bit faster and there are seasons I’m going to move slower and both can be done righteously. This is knowing when to stroll and this is knowing when to sprint.  Each can be done to the glory of God. 

Thank you for reading the blog today! I hope it has been a breath of fresh air to you. Pass it along to a friend in need of a little encouragement today. Being a mom is challenging and we need so much support on the journey. More people need to know that they never, ever have to lay down their peace. 

You can get more encouragement and emotional support at leslieburris. com. I’ll see you soon!