I realize lately that when I write, I am consistently harping on the reality of busyness and its role in our lives. This blog is as much journal as anything, a locale I come to occasionally to offer what’s on my heart and mind, and this topic is apparently a consistently weighty one for me.
In a sociology class I teach, I asked the students to comment on a portion of Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy I had given them. It was an intro, a prologue, to the book, and there was very little in this portion that was what I would call particularly spiritual or religious, except that Willard was addressing our contemporary confusion over morality and meaning. He termed it flying upside down, that in our present age we cannot tell what is up and what is down, and we are headed in a dangerous direction and don’t even know it. Among several realities he referenced was the plague of busyness, the way we dash back and forth and in and out like rats in a cage, trying to find — or else thinking we have found — some sense of trascendent meaning and existential purpose.
In reading the responses of the students, I realized that I am not alone in seeing the problem with our living “in the matrix,” to borrow from the movie’s idea of a small, cramped, and unreal arena in which we act out our lives. The comments from the students’ papers were consistent in labeling this as a problem they have come to recognize as well. I was blown away at their perception. The understanding of this thought of “flying upside down” is well-known, I suspect, something that we each recognize on some level.
I think it was Richard Foster that said busyness wasn’t a device of the Enemy; it is the Enemy. Maybe so. Maybe the Evil One masquerading as an angel of light.
Think about our culture for a second. What is the typical response of someone you meet up with when you ask them how they are? There are those few exceptions, but generally the reply goes along the lines of, “Oh, so busy” or, “Lots of things going on” or, “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve got on my plate” or something of the like. Even in church circles — or, in my experience, especially in church circles.
Why is that? What’s the story there?
Sometimes it may be a sincere gesture to try to catch you up on good things happening in life, especially for someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Sometimes. But not typically. More often, it is a substitution for meaning, something nearly lost to us in our society. But we desperately need meaning. This is not an option for us. So we create it ourselves, replace it from something else we are familiar with.
And we are certainly familiar with busyness.
The other night I was listening to a Podcast of some theological discussion (honestly, I can’t remember what the discussion was really about), and was struck by some off-handed comment that the Bible is primarily about God, not about man, and that, in fact, man was only a minor blip on the screen of God’s live and story. That is certainly not a common view of reality by Christians I know and read about. We have become the center of everything going on.
I’m not good with that description either, by the way, the thought that we are minor players on the stage. I happen to believe that God has given us a very prominent role in His cosmic script, but I do agree that we are not the central object around which the universe revolves. I think most of us would agree that the Lord God is, of course, our gravitational center and around whom all things move. Picture the planets encircling the sun. ”In Him we live,” I think is how Paul put it, “and move.” Even here, the sense is not so much that we live around Him, but within Him somehow, as if we are not so much planets around a sun, but rather the corona itself, prominences, solar flares.
But somehow we end up zipping off from our Center and shooting out into an endless and cold void, trying our hardest to find something larger than ourselves to clutch to so as to give us at least a small taste of our rightful place with God, so that we can feel even a subtle feeling of being held in place. And these objects and events and ideologies we busily define ourselves by, they are so tempting exactly because they can make us feel connected and purposeful. They do draw upon our need for transcendence. Otherwise, they would not be so alluring.
Have you noticed how it can be anything? We’ll take our hearts to the smallest and most insignificant moment or memory or habit or object or idea and begin building our lives around it. A fragment or debris from some far-roaming object. And before long, that’s all we can cling to. How could we ever find our way back again, and so we cling desperately and tenaciously to what we must know is not great enough for us, not worthy of our devotion and worship.
School. A person, even a romatic relationship. A band. Going to concerts or shows. Sophistication. Money. A social cause. An identity as a “good person.” Reading. Video games. TV shows or movies. Church attendance. That new car we’ve got our eyes on. The economic “crisis.” Reputation.
The list is literally endless. I’ll give us this — we are pretty creative when it comes to our busyness. Our godless worship. Our idolatry.
And let’s face it. We are, all of us, guilty of this. We’ve got to come there first if we are ever to break free from them and find our way back home again. Step one is to recognize we are far away.
Step two? Own the fact that we are made for more, that we are made to encircle and have our being in God, and that only that will satisfy our longings that threaten to destroy us.
And the third step? Only this: crying out to the only One who can save us from these things we cling to and that cling to us.
I know this because I am here. It seems sometimes like a daily experience for me to wake up, recognize that even through the night I have wondered from my place in Him, embrace my desire and longing for Life – which is to say, check my compass and recall that I am headed somewhere, and that this isn’t it. And then cry out for God to rescue me. This is why the Psalms are full of that very thing — cries for rescue and deliverance from their enemies. To be restored and refreshed in this Life that is Him, to be reconnected to the true Vine of that Life.
My friends, the enemy of our day — not the only one, perhaps, but certainly one of the greatest and most effective tactics the Evil One uses — is “busyness” as a replacement for true meaning. It’s a stow-away, a double-agent, an angel of darkness masquerading as one of us. We’re made for more. So much more. Let’s find what that is. Let’s remember what that is. Let’s be done with things that we know in our hearts will never be good enough. And let’s ask our Creator and Lover to bring us back into the source of that Life.
