No More Blank-looks, Busyness, or Being Bullied

You may have noticed that it has been almost a month since I have written on my blog. Throughout the summer I had written something most every week but things began to drop off as we signed a lease for a new worship center and we put a bid on a house. Over the last month we closed on our house and moved in (relatively speaking) and now we have submitted our permits and entered the construction phase of our new church home. While that is very exciting it has reminded me how serious the problem of busyness is for the church.

We in the church have bought into the worldly ideology of being busy and we have made a value out of packing our planners full. As a child I remember being told that as technology increased we would have greater leisure time and be able to accomplish the same amount of work in less time. This ideal of increased leisure quickly gave way to increased productivity, which sounds lofty and high-minded, and makes the idea of increased leisure sound lazy and ignoble. We in America pride ourselves on being productive and we have convinced ourselves that a busy life is one full of purpose. We have convinced ourselves that children who are actually loved will have lots of activities to keep them busy and never bored: music lessons, playing sports, and tutoring, The education system has responded by adding lots of homework, they believe will make us more competitive in a world that has become increasingly small and where America is loosing its edge educationally. We believe if we drive harder and accomplish more, that we will outrun our competition and continue to hold first place globally . . . So why isn’t that actually happening?

The truth is that in our busyness, our constantly being at work or on our smart phones, and even our efforts at home to keep everybody in the family working, is leading to emotional and mental exhaustion, and it is killing our creativity. No wonder we want to just “veg” in front of the idiot box. A wise man once said to me, we need to rest, not because the work is done, but because the work is never done. There is always more to do, more to accomplish, and with our smart phones we can take it with us where ever we go, even into our bedrooms. A recent wireless phone maker made the point that we needed to be saved from our phones by showing a scantly clad wife trying to get the attention of her smartphone engaged husband. The scary thing is not that she was dressed so scantly on TV but that most wives could easily identify with that commercial. What is wrong with us?

Over the summer, when we first moved here to get the church started I had dedicated myself to more reading of my Bible, more time in prayer, and to time spend time listening to God, as well as other creative and reflective tasks. The result was that I created lots of new materials, taught better lessons, wrote more, and thought more clearly. However, as I have inevitably gotten busy I have stretched myself thinner, my lists of accomplishments are longer, and my planner is more full. I have more check marks on my smartphone ‘to-do’ list–the marks of success? The problem is that the more busy I am the less time I have for people so relationships suffer. Then my creative and reflective time dissipated making sermons preparation more difficult, and my writing less frequent. For that matter I have no material to write about because my own reading time has reduced to a minimum, my prayer time has become perfunctory, and all the creative energy has been sucked out of my life. To boot, I have become more tired, anxious, and emotionally spent, and at the end of the day, I find myself sitting down to “veg” in front of the TV, joining millions of others in brainless, emotionless, non-activity. I am not like that. So how do I fight back against this malaise? Do I just pile more stuff on? Do I quit sleeping so I can read and be creative? (I am talking like a madman of course.)

You see, while many in our society are complaining about us getting fat and lazy, and spending too much time in front of the TV, all these “experts” do is suggest we do more: go exercise, read books, and pile on activities to improve our lives and minds. As a pastor I have foolishly piled on these same suggestions, with a more spiritual note of course, that you make time to read in your Bible and for prayer. (Let’s add in some guilt to the already compounding problem.)

Is the problem really TV, video games, and fast food? Do our children really benefit from endless hours of scheduled activity and piles of homework? Our standardized educational test scores indicate that we are only mid-field globally in education while countries whose test scores are higher have a high value on leisure time, and do not tax their children with endless homework. My point is not what they are doing, but asking the question, are we lost in a sea of busyness that suggests purpose and meaning? In a sea of busyness are we dying of thirst for a life that really satisfies? Maybe the blank-look on our faces, as we sit in front of the TV, is really just a response to the overwhelming vastness of our sea? When you can’t see land, you don’t hold out much hope of being rescued.

Often as a pastor I get teased about only working one hour a week. I laugh and say, No I only get paid for one hour a week the other 49 hours are volunteer hours. The truth is that as an American pastor I am always concerned about being perceived as lazy. The jokes are too numerous to be funny but tell me that people really do think pastors are lazy. In response to that I feel the need to have a task list longer than anyone else. I have read books like the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Leaders and I taken Franklin-Covey courses, and read numerous business books on productivity, even stuff on six-sigma practices. While all of those things have helped me to prioritize my work for the better, I am convinced that my yielding to this cultural pressure is essentially being unfaithful to my calling, and unfaithful to the flock I lead. As a pastor I want to be culturally current without being culturally naïve, driven or deceived. When the culture is destructive I should be the voice of opposition, calling people to repent of destructive behavior, and pointing the way to solid ground, and even modeling it in my own life on some level. The truth is that we in professional ministry are all more culturally relevant than we know. In fact, sometimes we even hold cultural values up as a standard and spiritualize these values with titles like calling busyness the Protestant Work-ethic so as to disguise our own workaholic tendencies, our own brokenness, and our own performance-laden need for approval. Surely not I?

The truth is that when God gave us the Sabbath, it was not for us to have another law to keep. Jesus said it best in Mark 2.27; The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The point is that Sabbath was given to us because we need time for re-creation. We need to be renewed, and doing more in the hope that we can go fast enough to get it all done is futile. If you will not rest until your done, then you will not rest until your dead. Moreover, we need to ask, does cramming more into a day really make us more productive? Funny, is it not, that no one is saying that all this busyness is improving the quality of things? If the quality of our work and our lives is suffering, and at the end of the day we are so brain dead we would rather watch reruns of “Friends” rather than have a friends over, are we gaining anything? Maybe we need to call attention to the lie, that doing more makes us better? Maybe we need to get smart and turn off our smartphones? Maybe we need to say ‘no’ more often to activity. Maybe our kids will be all right if they can’t play three instruments and speak six languages before they take their ACT or SAT? Maybe they will be all right if they go to the same college you went to and don’t go to Oxford, Yale, The University of Texas, or Harvard? (What? Are you laughing because I put Harvard on that list?) My point is that I need to put my Franklin Covey priority system to work, and live what I say I believe. My ‘A’ list should include time (real time) to pray, to spend with people, and to reflect on God’s Word. While my ‘B’ list should include the stuff that only I can do. My ‘C’ list should be those tasks I simply feel I must do, and well, I should not make a ‘D’ list, and none of these lists should be more than three or four items long.

What then should I do about the next time I feel pressed by the worldly value of busyness? First, I should not cower, and cave. Second, I need to fight back, refuse to give into fools gold, and persevere in my efforts to do what is best, instead of letting myself be bullied by others who are just poor quality copies of some guru they are trying to imitate. Freedom, creativity, reflection, relationship building, all of these take time, and don’t build long lists. They do however build treasure in heaven.