To Hell With The Hustle, A 5-Day Devotional from Jefferson Bethke ናሙና

Day 1: 

Something about our culture has hypnotized us. It’s alluring, and it sucks us into the vortex with its immense influence.

It’s not unlike the story of the frog and the water. If you put a frog in water that is already boiling, it will jump right out from the sheer pain and collision of senses. But if you put a frog in water at room temperature, then steadily raise the heat one degree at a time until it is boiling, the frog will slowly but eventually die.

Our culture—us—we’re that frog right now, thinking, This is nice and cozy, but the heat has been climbing. This book is me saying, Wait a minute. It’s starting to get a little warm in here. The values and pace of our culture, the speed at which it is moving, the demands and pressure we all collectively feel, the ethos of hustle injected into us all at birth—it’s all boiling us alive. But we don’t notice it because it has happened steadily over the last century or so.

It’s time to stop and consider the cost of all of this hustle. 

All this speed. All this disillusionment. And just like most antidotes, I think a better way forward comes in administering the very opposite of the disease. We are slowly crushing our souls with noise, fame, work, and tribalism; we’re living in our own private hells that are dragging us down spiritually, emotionally, and physically. So I say to hell with the hustle. And I mean that in two ways. To hell with it, meaning I’m done. Full stop. We can defiantly say no to where this is all headed. And two, I also truly mean to hell with it. Jesus was never in a hurry. Jesus was the fully human one. The prototype of all humanity. And I think we can pretty easily see that He was someone actively resisting cultural pressures, on many levels. Hustle isn’t Him. And if hustle isn’t Him, there’s only one other place it could come from. Hell. The curse. The source of death.