Alan Fadling serves as a frequent speaker and consultant with local churches, national organizations and leaders internationally. He's also President and Founder of Unhurried Living, Inc. in Mission Viejo, CA, inspiring people to rest deeper, live fuller and lead better. He shows leaders how to get perspective so their leadership flows from a full soul and out of healthy rhythms of rest and work. A trained Spiritual Director, Alan is also the award-winning author of An Unhurried Leader and An Unhurried Life, which was honored with a Christianity Today Award of Merit in spirituality.
You can find Alan on:
Or check out his work at unhurriedliving.com.
Resources
An Unhurried Life by Alan Fadling
An Unhurried Leader by Alan Fadling
Episode Audio:
Chapter 1 - You Must Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry from Your Life
You know the feeling. It's that constant, day-in day-out, never-ending sense that the next thing is waiting for you, ready to add one more thing to your list. You know this kind of life can't be what God intended, but you just don't see any way to live life differently. Kids need to be taken places, work needs to be done, groceries need to be bought, and bills need to be paid. And it seems like the faster you move in getting things done, the more things get added to your plate. We've got great news for you! A lifestyle of discipleship doesn't and shouldn't look like this. In fact, as Alan points out in this chapter, one of the most important things we can do as we follow Jesus is to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.
Chapter 2 - Learning to Make Rest a Way of Life
It seems that no matter what your culture is or where you’re at in the world, hurry has infected our way life. We all feel hurried. We seem to be perpetually busy, and yet, behind on our work. Whether it’s in ministry or some other vocation, we all feel pressured to produce at the highest level. We desire to be excellent in everything we do. And we should strive for excellence. But excellence doesn’t mean we should be hurried. As Alan Fadling points out, Jesus is proof that you can serve others with excellence and still live an unhurried, relaxed life. And as followers of Jesus, we must learn to make this unhurried life part of our lifestyle of discipleship.
Chapter 3 - How to Know You're Living a Hurried Life
How do you know if you're living a hurried life? If your goal as someone who lives a lifestyle of discipleship is to live a life of rest, how do you begin the change from stressed and hurried to rested and relaxed? In a famous sketch, Bob Newhart played a psychologist who gave his client probably the most important advice you could ever get for a hurried life: "Stop it!" Now this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to just stop being in a hurry. Instead, as Alan talks about in this chapter, it may just mean practicing disciplines of disengagement, disciplines that mean, well, stopping. You won't want to miss Alan's wisdom in this chapter that comes from his own experience over the last 30 years in ministry.
Chapter 4 - Not Everything We Call Rest is Restful
What happens at the end of a long day at work? All you want to do is go home, sit on the couch and turn off your brain. You just want to rest. But what if I told you that many of our common leisurely activities like watching tv or scrolling through social media aren’t actually restful. Doing them doesn’t take much effort, but they give us small, consistent hits of dopamine that makes them feel restful. But these activities only numb us. They don’t actually recharge us. As Alan talks about in this chapter, it takes effort to rest properly. And if we want to live an unhurried life, we must learn how to rest in a way that breathes life back into us, not numbs us to it.
Chapter 5 - Do You Have to Produce Fruit in Your Lifetime?
What happens at the end of a long day at work? All you want to do is go home, sit on the couch and turn off your brain. You just want to rest. But what if I told you that many of our common leisurely activities like watching tv or scrolling through social media aren’t actually restful. Doing them doesn’t take much effort, but they give us small, consistent hits of dopamine that makes them feel restful. But these activities only numb us. They don’t actually recharge us. As Alan talks about in this chapter, it takes effort to rest properly. And if we want to live an unhurried life, we must learn how to rest in a way that breathes life back into us, not numbs us to it.
Chapter 6 - Do You Have What It Takes to Rest Like Jesus?
Dallas Willard described Jesus with one word: Relaxed. That may cause you to pause, but the more we explore this idea, the more we find it's absolutely true! If we've learned one thing from our conversation with Alan, it's that rest demonstrates our identity is in Christ as children of God. And this, more than anything else, describes who Jesus is: God's son, who relied fully on his father for everything. And from that place of rest in his father's care, he lived the way he did. The question today is simple, do we have the ability to rest completely in our identity as children of God and from that place of rest live out our calling?