Too Busy

It is no secret that I am and have always been a reader of Oswald Chamber, a man of the early 20th century who is responsible for "My Utmost for His Highest."  Even though I have been reading this daily devotional since the late 1960's, I still find myself encountering words that go deep and seem as new.  Often I am amazed at how a word written so long ago could have been written yesterday. In a day when the contemporary church faces great turmoil and its leaders are searching for the way forward, what Chambers wrote over a hundred years ago  offers much clear guidance.    

Such is the case with a recent offering which read, "The great enemy to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the present day is the conception of practical work that has not come from the New Testament, but from the systems of the world in which endless energy and activities are insisted upon, but no private life witj God."  Being able to reflect on how I served the church and how it is with those who are even now actively doing that work, it seems that "doing" provided then and now a large share of what motivates the church in its life.  The church in this regards has become a mirror of the culture which is obsessed with staying too busy.  Being busy is not the same thing as being too busy which is what happens when the private life with God is put in a secondary place.   

Being too busy is easy to see as it reveals itself in being too busy for family, too busy for self care, and too busy for long periods of stillness in which our life with God is cultivated.  It is not hard to see.  We just do not want to see it and when we see it, we justify it by the good we see ourselves getting done.  When we are too busy for a life with God that is unhurried, deliberate, and intentional we have put ourselves on a road that leads to the loss of those things and those people which truly give us our life.