Busyness: To Whom Be All The Glory?

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I recently had a conversation with a student from Haiti that is studying here in the states where he said essentially the following: ‘Americans are so busy, rushing from place to place, always hurrying at a dizzying pace. Why don’t you slow down and take time to serve God more often? Why don’t churches get together more than once a week on Sunday morning in America? Where is there room for serving one another and bearing one another’s burdens and follow all the commands we are given in Scripture about the things the Church should be doing for one another and the community?’

This conversation really got me thinking. Why do we lock ourselves in this prison of busyness? I began to think about the reasons we hurry about as if we are out of our minds half the time. The list of pursuits that keep us busy and rushing about seems to be summed up best as follows: Money, happiness, and self fulfillment (and out of these spring career, success, our own glorification, possessions,  luxuries, pleasure, and pretty much all other pursuits).

We are caught in a pit that we ourselves are digging. The church is as guilty of this as the secular world. We have 400 people in our church and 10 of them have significant roles in serving the church and reaching out to the community because everyone else is too busy. O.K. so maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but not as much a one as we might deceive ourselves into thinking. We’ve bought the lies of the world and not only are we miserable in our busy pursuit of the things of this world, we are robbing God of glory by saying in effect “yes, you have it right secular world, the one who dies with the most toys really does win.”

We spit on the cross by denying its transforming power in our lives and the surpassing worth of following and serving Christ. We might say “Lord, you are the most valuable thing, the only thing that truly matters” on Sunday morning in church, but our lives speak that everything but Him is worth everything to us during the remainder of the week. It’s no wonder people don’t hear what we are saying; our actions drown out the words we are speaking and kill our witness. How is the secular world supposed to see Christ as supremely valuable if the people claiming to be the people of God aren’t living in a way that shows they really believe He’s supremely valuable?

In the next post, I’m going to delve into this topic further, but I want to focus on redeeming busyness for us. I don’t think it’s busyness in and of itself that is the problem. No, I think it’s what we busy ourselves with that is the problem. Here is a taste of what’s to come in the next post:

“I’m too busy.” “I have so much to do.” “I don’t have any time.” Busyness: The excuse, the oppressor, the enemy, the distraction, or the freedom and gift. “Freedom and gift?” you say. “I understand the first four, but freedom and gift? Really???!!!”

Yes, the freedom and gift of busyness. You see, our trouble with the concept of busyness is not simply the fact that we’re busy. The problem is that we are misguided in what we are busy with. In America, we busy ourselves with things that oppress, things that wear on us and weigh us down. We busy ourselves with things that have no lasting value, no ultimate worth. We serve the almighty schedule and planner, the calendar stands over us as an enemy that we cannot escape, a prison if you will. The rewards we accumulate for busyness never last, never satisfy. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

(Picture from sovereigngraceministries.org)