Beloved,
I did it again.
One of you asked during Sunday’s fellowship lunch how my family was doing, and I responded by expressing how busy life is right now. It’s something I’ve really been trying to stop doing. But bad habits are not easily broken, and it has become commonplace for me to answer questions regarding my life and wellbeing with the B-word.
B-U-S-Y
The not-so-funny reality was that I had just finished teaching a Sunday school class on two of the main hindrances to cultivating liturgical rhythms that lead to a vibrant and flourishing spirituality, and one of them was an unholy busy.
There is, of course, a healthy form of busy. Just look at the earthly ministry of the sinless Son of God. If ever a life qualified for the adjective busy, it was Christ’s. There are times to work long hours, forego sleep, and strenuously labor in our callings for God. In our day which is so fixated upon self-care, it is good for us to remember that the call of Christ is one of self-denial and cross-bearing. It is one of spending and being spent. As the Puritan Thomas Manton wrote, “It is better to be worn out with labor than eaten out with rust and consumed with idleness.” And being worn out like our Savior and His apostles entails a kind of holy busyness.
But while the New Testament narratives give us windows into the often fast-paced days and sometimes sleepless nights of Christ and His followers, nowhere do we find them venting about how busy they were or how full their calendar was or how much they needed a vacation.
So why is it such a common thing for me to respond in this way, especially when I am arguably far less busy than these men ever were?
I think the answer is part cultural and part spiritual. In various ways, our culture teaches us to measure importance by way of busyness. And who doesn’t want to feel important? That is where the spiritual dimension comes in which actually takes us back to the other hindrance we looked at on Sunday–an unholy identity. When I am seeking my sense of self in what I accomplish, how much I do, how I perform, or how others perceive me, I tend to say “yes” to things I should not and then take every opportunity to subtly bemoan how much I have on my plate. In a sick kind of way, the b-word makes me feel important, bolstering my insecure self. Writing for The New York Times, Tim Kreider explains, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
So it turns out that an unholy busy is ordinarily the result of an unholy identity, and this devilish duo is detrimental to a holy and humble walk with God.
But when we are living out of a proper self-perception as eternally loved children of God in Jesus Christ (i.e., a holy identity), it ignites a passion within to live unto the glory of our Father in conformity to our elder Brother (i.e., a holy busy). And because our importance is rooted in God’s adoptive grace in Christ and not how full our calendars are, we don’t feel the need to publish our busyness to the word.
Instead, the B-word may be eliminated from our vocabulary altogether.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Nick