Unhurried Living | Helping Christians Rest Deeper & Lead Better

One-third of our waking lives is spent at work. Work is where we make culture and come into contact with our world. Work is central to God's mission to redeem souls, systems, and structures. And God works through our work to bring hope to the brokenness of our surrounding culture. The way of Jesus Christ is good news for the world, and that includes the transformation of our ordinary work into a s...

We’re living in anxious times. I don’t hear anyone saying otherwise. And many feel utterly overwhelmed and powerless against the flood of anxiety that fills our hearts, our minds, our news feeds and our social media communities.    Two weeks ago my latest book, A Non-Anxious Life , was released. The more I talk with leaders about soul hurry, the more I realize that a very common variety of it is a...

1990 was a momentous & tragic year for me. Sadly, it was the year my dad passed away. His was a traumatic and life-altering death. I was just 26-years-old.    Unfortunately, my dad’s death was just the beginning of a five-year season of loss. So much to experience by one so young.    Today, I’ll be sharing with you my journey of loss and how God met me with great grace.   Abiding video referenced...

At the turn of the century, Billy Graham said, "I believe that one of the next great moves of God is going to be through believers in the workplace.” In the last few years, I’ve witnessed a powerful work of God’s Spirit in and through men and women who are living their faith in their places of business.    We are always leaning into the question, “How do I integrate my life of faith and the work o...

I love every part of our church's opening prayer and today I share about the importance of this prayer as well as the multiple sermons that emerge from the truths tucked within.    Eternal God, heavenly Father, with great joy we thank you for graciously accepting us as living members of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, and for feeding us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood...

“Anything you could do in anxiety, you could do a lot better in peace.” That’s something Dallas Willard said. And it became one of the seeds that grew into my latest book with InterVarsity Press: A Non-Anxious Life: Experiencing the Peace of God’s Presence. It has been the most personal and most difficult book I’ve written so far. And it releases tomorrow!     I wonder what your anxiety has been l...

There’s one more week until we’re back with the next season of Unhurried conversations at the intersection of spiritual leadership and soul care. And I have great news! Gem is coming back to the Unhurried Living Podcast. We’re talking about this today and we look forward to sharing what’s up with the Unhurried Living Podcast Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about adver...

I want what Jim has. This is the phrase 17-year-old Alan, my husband, uttered as he made one of his first moves into the Christian life. I have always loved hearing Alan share about the first time he went forward in a church to receive Christ. I’ve heard this story multiple times and I’m always struck by how simple and heartfelt Alan’s desire was. We’ll talk more about this today…   ______________...

It’s near the beginning of the calendar year and, for some, it feels like a fresh start. Most of us are long past making resolutions. We’ve come to see that they don’t last and are followed up by shame and guilt. I haven’t made resolutions for years.   But I thought it might be good to share with you a few simple ways you could plan for some soul care in an ongoing way. These ideas are bottom shel...

Breathing. It’s as natural as, well, breathing. We breathe all day long without giving it a thought. It’s just one of the many astounding aspects of our God-given bodies. I’m grateful for all the processes that continue to keep me healthy and alive, aren’t you?    Today, using the word BREATHE, I’m going to guide you in a spiritual practice that you can use in the middle of any given day. We’ll ma...

Almost everyone I speak with these days is tired or stressed in troubling ways. Not only do we carry our regular burdens and concerns, but we also carry around our knowledge of what is going on in our country and around the globe.   While it is true that we cannot psychologically bear up under the weight of all that we see and hear in the information age—we do want to have a basic knowledge of wor...

Many of you have likely heard of a way of engaging scripture called Lectio Divina. It is a kind of “Divine Reading.” What I love about Lectio Divina is that it is a slow and formational way of engaging the bible. It can help us move from our heads to our hearts. Lectio Divina is reflective, meditative, receptive and responsive.    Let’s begin with a little Lectio 101, and then I will guide you in...

Today I’m talking with Joanna Meyer, the author of the recently released book Women, Work and Calling .    No matter what title you have or don’t have, we are all working women. People, tasks, and schedules fill our days and we all have influence in these spheres.    How do you respond to God’s calling? How does God grow our soul through our work? How do we tap into our vocational power?    Joanna...

One of our great concerns at Unhurried Living is caring for the souls of leaders. And one of the ways we focus on this is by helping leaders learn to care well for their own souls. It’s too easy to become so busy with work we believe God has given us, but not enjoying the life that God has given us.    There are so many good spiritual practices that can help us care well for our souls. That’s why...

Today, I’m sharing the last of four episodes on the theme of rest. If you haven’t listened to the first three, I encourage you to go back. These have been some of the most important episodes I’ve offered in our six-and-a-half years as a podcast.    As we continue to navigate so many changes that have come to so many of us in these last few years, I wonder how tired you feel inside. I’m not talking...

A few years ago I read Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion . He put into eloquent prose a dynamic that I had experienced, but had not yet found words to describe.   There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profo...

I’ve been a reader of the New Testament for forty-five years now. I’m still grateful for the wisdom and life guidance I find in those pages. Checking my current favorite NIV Bible, I realize that the New Testament takes up 225 pages. That’s about the length of many of the books I talk with authors about on this podcast. What I mean to say is that it isn’t as big as I sometimes imagine. And I reali...

Transition. How do you feel when you hear this word? For some, transitions are welcome because it’s a movement from one place to another. For others, transitions are unwelcome for the same reason. Change can be disconcerting. But whatever you feel about transitions, that’s where we’re headed today in our conversation.   ______________________________________________________ Follow Gem on Instagram...

They say that authors often write books that they themselves need. That has certainly been true when it comes to what I’ve written about Jesus’s rhythms of work and rest. I have a deep-seated efficiency and productivity engine inside me.    While this has often served me well in my work, it has also gotten in the way when it comes to entering into God’s gift of rest for me. It still feels like a d...

I have long been a great appreciator of the writings of Eugene Peterson. I realized recently that one of my first introductions to the idea of an unhurried life was from his book The Contemplative Pastor . I still have my 1989 hardcover edition of that book. It it, he has a chapter in which he invited pastors like me to become an “unbusy pastor.” I’m grateful for a full shelf of his books that hav...

Today we're talking about being a mentoring presence, or wise woman, in the lives of others. This really is an encouragement to any woman listening to think of herself as a wise woman in the life of another. The actress, Julia Louis Dreyfus, has a new podcast called “Wiser Than Me.” She is 62 and she interviews women who are older than her. She asks questions so that she can glean life wisdom from...

My first book, An Unhurried Life, which was published over ten years ago, had this as it’s subtitle: “Following Jesus' Rhythms of Work and Rest.” Knowing what I know now about our great cultural struggle to rest well, I might have changed that to: “Following Jesus’ Rhythms of Rest and Work . It’s not that rest is more important than work. It’s that real rest is so neglected these days.    And many...

Are you now, or have you recently been, in a difficult situation? Most of us have at least one circumstance in our lives, at any given point, that isn’t going the way we had hoped. Today I’m sharing a personal story of climbing a mountain at high elevation. Together, we’ll look at it literally and metaphorically. ______________________________________________________ Follow Gem on Instagram and gr...

It’s been nearly 45 years ago that I attended a jazz concert sponsored by a Sacramento area church. I was invited to it by my boss, Jim. I had been working for him for a year or two at the Magic Tunnel Car Wash. It was at that concert that Jim’s life, shaped as it was by his love for Jesus, came to make sense to me. When someone asked me why I’d come forward at the end of the concert, my answer wa...

The theme of today’s episode has been fermenting in my thinking and in my rhythm of life for a while now. In fact, I’ll be sharing four episodes this season about rest. Today, I’m going to share some ideas about how exactly might we cultivate a good rest ethic. It’s something with which we’re much less familiar as a culture than a good “work ethic,” but it’s just as important.  ___________________...