I was sitting at the red light down at 25-A and Northwoods last week, and the guy in front of me didn’t move the second the light turned green. Two seconds. That’s it. Two seconds. And I’m leaning on my horn like he just personally insulted my mother. Hurry up! Move! I have things to do!

I tell that story on myself because it’s embarrassing, and because I think most of you have a version of it. We are a hurried people. We’ve got Amazon Prime delivering things to our door same-day, Apple Pay so we don’t even have to dig out a card, and phones that buzz at us approximately every four seconds with something “urgent.” We built all this stuff to save time. So why does life feel more complicated than ever?

Here’s a number that stopped me in my tracks: Americans take less vacation than almost any other industrialized country in the West. We average a little over two weeks. Germany? Six weeks. France? Five. And get this — their productivity is roughly the same as ours. We’re not getting more done. We’re just more tired while we do it.

There’s a doctor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Suzanne Koven, who wrote about this in the Boston Globe. She said she started noticing the same condition showing up in patient after patient — exhaustion, irritability, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, back pain, the whole list. No blood test catches it. No X-ray shows it. But she could spot it every time. She called it what it is: busyness. The new sick.

Let me ask you something I had to ask myself first: when’s the last time you went a full day without scrolling? The average American is on their phone more than four hours a day. Do the math on that and it comes out to sixty full days a year. Two months. Gone. Into a screen.

Or try this one: when’s the last time you drove under the speed limit on purpose? Not because you were stuck behind someone — on purpose?

I love what Dennis Miller said about red lights. Something to the effect that you spend your whole life stopping at every one of them, and then the one time in your life they let you run every single light without stopping is your own funeral procession. Because apparently once you’re dead, making good time finally matters.

It’s funny because it’s true. We are sprinting toward a finish line we don’t actually want to reach any faster.

Somebody told me once: you cannot travel faster than the person you’re following. Think about that for a second — physically, that’s just true. If you’re tailing someone on the highway, you can’t outpace them and call it “following.” But it’s spiritually true too. If we say we’re following Jesus, we can’t be moving at a pace He never moved at. And here’s the thing about Jesus — when you actually read the Gospels, He was never in a hurry. Never. He was busy. People were lined up. Needs were real and constant. But busy and frantic are not the same thing, and Jesus never confused the two.

There’s a scene in Mark 1 that I keep coming back to. Jesus has just had one of the most demanding days of His ministry — preaching, healing Peter’s mother-in-law, and then as word spreads, people start showing up all evening with their sick and suffering. He’s ministering late into the night. Exhausting day by any measure.

And then — this is the part that gets me — Mark 1:35 says before daybreak the next morning, He got up and went to an isolated place to pray.

He didn’t go back into the crowd first thing. Didn’t schedule another healing service. Didn’t call a staff meeting to debrief the night before. He went and got alone with His Father. Jesus understood something we keep forgetting: rest isn’t the reward you earn after the work is done. Rest is the gift that makes the work possible in the first place.

I want to give you three things from this, because I think they’re the way out of running on empty.

First — find a quiet place and get alone with God. Solitude wasn’t an accident for Jesus. It was the plan. Most of us can’t stand silence. We’ve got music on, a show running in the background, a podcast going, the phone buzzing. Psalm 46 says, “Be still and know that I am God.” Notice it doesn’t say be busy. Doesn’t say be productive. Be still. We’ve all heard “don’t just sit there, do something.” Sometimes God’s saying exactly the opposite: don’t just do something, sit there.

Second — learn to pray and listen, not just talk. I think a lot of our prayer life is really just us handing God a list and then moving on with our day. But some of the most important things God says to us happen in the listening, not the talking. What if part of our problem is we’re too busy talking to actually hear Him?

Third — and this is the hard one — learn to say no. Most of us aren’t exhausted because we’re doing bad things. We’re exhausted because we’re doing too many good things, and every single one of them feels urgent and important. So we keep saying yes. Yes to the meeting, yes to the commitment, yes to the project. But here’s the truth nobody tells you: every yes is also a no to something else. I know pastors who say yes to every demand from church members and, without meaning to, are saying no to their own spouse and kids. The question was never “is this a good thing.” The question is whether you’re saying yes to the right things.

In verse 37, when they finally track Jesus down, they tell Him, “Everyone is looking for you.” Translation: Lord, the crowd’s waiting, the need is real, let’s get back to it. And Jesus says no. He says we’re going on to other towns. He said no to a legitimate, good, urgent opportunity because He knew His Father’s bigger purpose for His life. Somebody once said every person who’s ever lived has struggled with a messiah complex except one — and He actually was the Messiah. You’re not the savior of the world. Neither am I. That job’s taken.

I’ll leave you with this. I heard about a cardiologist who hired someone to reupholster the chairs in her waiting room. When he finished, she asked what she owed him, and he told her half of what he’d originally quoted. She was confused — why the discount? He said, “Your patients never lean back.” He’d only had to redo the fabric on the front of the seats, because that’s the only part anyone ever touched.

Church family, there’s a reason Jesus said come to me, lean on me, rest in me. He’s not offering us the front edge of the chair. He’s inviting us to lean all the way back.