I like to be busy. When asked how I am doing, I have often responded proudly by talking about how busy I am with all of the important things in my schedule. You see, if I am busy that means my life is productive and significant. In fact, whenever I face the possibility of free time during a weekend, interterm or summer break, I usually make a long list of things I know I will probably never complete. Of course my addiction to busyness may be a little worse than yours. In fact, you may have no idea what I’m talking about. Whether you are the one who doesn’t know how to slow down or it’s your roommate who has the busyness addiction, hopefully this will help.
Before I get into it, I’d like to make two observations. The first is that we have fewer obligations and more free time now than we will ever have again. Secondly, some of us are much more lazy than we are busy and need to find better ways of stewarding the God-given gift of time than with endless hours of video games and TV. But that’s for another article.
I recently discovered the Google Ngram Viewer, which measures the amount of times a word or phrase is used in over 5.2 million books. According to the Ngram Viewer, the usage of the word “busy” is on the rise. In a popular New York Times blog titled “The Busy Trap,” Tim Kreider asserts that today almost everyone is busy and that we impose a need to be busy on ourselves and each other. In “If Time is Money Millenials Are Broke — And They Couldn’t Be Happier,” Forbes columnist Meggan Casserly says, “Being busy means you’re important, needed, valued,” and points to busyness as having “replaced the sports car as the new status symbol.”
I believe our generation is dangerously busy. We may find our need for busyness rooted in a desire for significance, meaning or social status, an ambitious personality or the fear of facing our pain, loneliness, anxiety and depression. Or maybe it’s all of this and more mixed together.
If we really want to understand the problem, then we have to take a look at the ramifications. Currently, the consequences may include sleep deprivation, neglected roommates and lives that are starving for stillness and prayer. But if we continue on like this we may find ourselves later in life as the absent fathers and frenzied mothers we so desperately don’t want to become.
The lure of busyness is no new thing. In the book of Haggai, God rebukes his people for busying themselves with their own houses rather than answering the summons to build a dwelling place for him. A few hundred years later, Martha was too distracted by her busyness to sit and listen at Jesus’ feet.
At this point I think it best to ask ourselves a few questions. Why are we so busy? Who have you neglected for the sake of your busy schedule? Is it your best friend? God? Yourself? Do you need to say no to some things — even good things — in order to build a dwelling place for God in your life? When was the last time you sat and listened at his feet?
