Psalms 57-59
Romans 4

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  
—John 10:10

If someone were to ask us, “What do you do in your spare time?”, what would our answer be? We may share about our hobbies, our volunteer work, the books we are reading or the book we are writing. We give responses like these because everyone knows that a busy life and a full life means it is an important life, right? In fact, some people like to intentionally work late so they could brag about working 70 or 80 hours a week. Through social media, we follow our friends and post things that we do—the vacation we took, things our kids are doing, our new workout routine and the new recipes we tried. We show how full our lives are because a full life and a busy life is an important life…right? But what if there is a problem with our busyness?

In John Mark Comer’s book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World, he writes: “We hear the refrain ‘I’m great, just busy’ so often we assume pathological busyness is okay. After all, everybody else is busy too. But what if busyness isn’t healthy? What if it’s an airborne contagion, wreaking havoc on our collective soul?” Have we ever considered the havoc that “pathological busyness” could wreak in our life?

The great loss and cost of a life that is too busy and too full is relationship with God and with each other. Thanks to technology, our smart phones give us access to millions of words, images, ideas and products every day; these things overcrowd our lives with one more thing we should learn, one more book we should read, one more skill our kids should know by such and such an age and one more way to cook rib roast. If we honestly reflect on our life, these things inundate us all the time and it is costing us relationships.

American Christian author John Ortberg once said, “For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.” May we take some time to honestly examine our life: are we busy trying to fill our life with things to feel important? Are the things we preoccupy ourselves with drawing us away from God and opportunities to build relationships with others?
May we recognize the most important thing in life is not about how busy we are, but living in a manner that honours God.

Dear God, I confess that I fill my life with things that make me distracted from the most important thing in my life—my relationship with You. Help me to cut out the things that are keeping me too busy to build relationships. Thank You, Lord.

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