There is a PDF version of this Discussion Guide here.
Read:
Epilogue.
Review, Reflect and Discuss
Feel free to comment and raise any questions that occur to you as you read. Don’t be limited to the questions listed after each summary, but they might help to prime your thinking.
Epilogue – JMC reflects on how his life is changing as he has been seeking to eliminate hurry from his life. He is organising his life around the principles of slowing down, simplifying and living from a centre of abiding. He acknowledges that it takes practice and the four practices he has explored in this book help, but he acknowledges we have to continually work on them. We never arrive or reach perfection. We continually practice. He suggests that a key is learning to live in the present, the now. To ‘inhabit the moment’. To see time as a gift. To not miss the goodness that is following us every day. He shares the verse about making it our ambition to live a quiet life, and as we do this and take up this easy yoke we find our capacity increases. We have to fight for this in our culture, and we have to decide it is worth fighting for.
- Do you find your life changing in any way as you have started to apply these practices?
- How do we ‘inhabit the moment’?
- How do we live a quiet life and still be productive?
Final Reflections – we have now finished the book. We have learned about the dangers and cost of hurry sickness and about four key practices to help us eliminate hurry from our lives: silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplifying and slowing. We acknowledge that this is going to be a lifetime of working on these, rather than perfecting them, and it will be a struggle at times. But it is worth it!
- What are the main things that you have learned from this book?
- What do you think you might change as a result of reading this book?
Moving Foward
John Mark Comer recognises that it is easy to read a book, see the value of what it teaches but then not really take the time to practically apply what we learn. He has therefore produced a Workbook to accompany this book and you can find it here. In a final guide to this book, we will consider how we are getting on with the workbook.