Is Your Busyness Robbing You?

Have I let busyness rob me of knowing God the way I might if I wasn't so busy?

I've been pondering this question for a few weeks. It's a challenging one to think about.

We live in a culture that prizes busyness. The answer to the question of how things are going is often that we're busy. And when we're not busy it can feel like we don't have the right answer to that question.

This thinking has infiltrated the church as well. There's a subtle pressure to add more volunteer time to the schedule if we can't continually tell people how busy we are. We look up to those who have filled their weekends and evenings with service.

But when we fill our schedules too full, often one of the first things that gets pushed out is our time with God. And this robs us of knowing God the way we could. Even when we're filling our time with serving at church, that busyness robs us of knowing God the way we could.

Don't get me wrong . . . I'm not saying there is anything inherently wrong with serving at church. In fact, I believe we should all be taking an active role in the church we belong to. But, when the time we spend serving our church makes us so busy we have no time for relationship with God, we have a problem.

How do we respond to this? How do we stop allowing busyness to rob us of knowing God?

We have to learn to create a life with space in it. Space, so we're not running from one thing to the next unsure if we'll be on time. Space, so we can linger with a friend in need. Space, so we can spend time with God and listen to His voice.

We have to learn to slow down - to stop living life in a hurry.

It doesn't come easy. It's a counter-cultural move.

I think we need to change what we celebrate and look up to. Instead of celebrating busyness and looking up to those who are really busy, we need to learn to celebrate being unable to talk about how busy we are.

We need to change the way we look at how we spend our time. We need to see our time with God as the most important thing. We need to move our time with God onto the non-negotiable list and allow other things to go when we don't have enough time to do it all.

Have you allowed busyness to rob you of knowing God the way you could if you weren't so busy?