Busy-Ness

Being too busy

Revelations 2:2-4

How many of us have become so busy and weary that we have lost our first love?

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A father and his young daughter were great friends and much in each other’s company. Then the father noted a change in his daughter. If he went for a walk, she excused herself from going. He grieved about it, but could not understand. When his birthday came, she presented him with a pair of exquisitely worked slippers, saying, “I have made them for you.”

Then he understood what had been the matter for the past three months, and he said, “My darling, I like these slippers very much, but next time buy the slippers and let me have you all the days. I would rather have my child than anything she can make for me.”

Some of us are so busy for the Lord that He cannot get much of us. To us He would say, “I know your works, your labor, your patience, but I miss the first love.”

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Most of us live extremely busy lives, no matter what age we are. Sometimes you have to sit back and wonder how we got to this point. So many things in our lives were designed to save time. Faster cars, faster computers, cell phones, microwaves, fast-food, you name it, it was designed to save time. Time for what, though? Instead of taking that time we’ve saved, instead we end up filling it with more things to do. We fill our lives with so many time saving things and strategies that we feel just plained rushed.

For some of us, that is a status symbol - something to be proud of. Something that says, you know what, I’m really busy, I’m somebody important - I’m successful. Look at all the things I do in a day.

But deep inside, there’s this desire for a simpler life, a slower life, a more meaningful life. We long for simplicity. Americans typically fall into this more so than Europeans, but that is quickly changing. We used to go home on vacation and feel so rushed and long to get back here where we could slow down a little bit and enjoy life again. But that seems to be changing these days. It seems that the world expects busyness.

Unfortunately, the result of this busyness in our lives tends to be alienation and emptiness. These days so many of us find ourselves stuck in a virtual world when talking to one another - emailing instead of talking face-to-face or even on the phone. Unfortunately more often than not, I find myself emailing somebody half way around the world that I don’t even know when my wife and kids are sitting right next to me, waiting for a moment of my time. How does that happen? How does this busyness take over our lives so quickly? Is that how we want to live? NO WAY!!! I don’t believe that for a second. But we get going so fast, that when we finally start to slow down and see where we are, we don’t have a clue how we got there. All we remember is the blurry view out the window.

More often than not, when our lives fill with this busyness, our relationships are the first things to suffer. We don’t have time to sit down and talk with our friends and family; and more importantly, we don’t seem to have time to sit down and talk to our Father, to God. We get so wrapped up in what we’re doing; so wrapped up in our own importance that we miss our time with God.

This isn’t just work that I’m talking about; this takes place in the church all the time. I find myself wrapped up in this a lot. Trying to make sure that everything is taken care of, everything is done, everything is just right and if it isn’t, I have to fix it. Forget about the real reason we’re all here, I have to fix this problem right now because if I don’t, the service won’t go well, people will be upset, etc. etc. etc. How nerve racking we really make our situations.

Do you really think that is how God wants us to live? Let’s take a look at Matthew 11:28-30: WOW!!! Jesus will give us rest - the burden he gives us is light? WOW!!! There are so many times that we feel the opposite, but why? Because the yokes that we put on ourselves aren’t light. The yokes that we put on one another aren’t light. Paul confronts this very same thing in Acts 15:10 when he addressed the church elders in Jerusalem. He says this (from the Message) "So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too?”