In ministering to teenagers today, I’m reminded weekly if not daily just how busy our world is. We wear our busyness around like a virtue. I'm often shocked by the schedules these teenagers keep. School, soccer, guitar lessons, homework, church, baby-sitting, and a myriad of other activities consume virtually every minute. They don't have a lot of time to ride bikes around the neighborhood and be kids. This has inadvertently created a generation that is very bad at conversation and entertaining themselves. The expectation is for every minute to be designed to entertain them. No wonder we get blank stares when we challenge them to sit and read their Bibles. But we all understand this certainly isn’t just a teenage phenomenon. We all fall prey to this. How often have you been asked the question, “how are you”, and you respond, “busy, really busy”?
So to the question, is it a good thing that we are busy? Productivity is good, responsibility is good, discipline is good, ambition and innovation can be good, but I’m not sure that busyness is good; in fact I would argue the opposite. Busyness can be harmful. We need time to think, to pray, to read, to stop and enjoy the creation that God has blessed us with. I'm afraid that we've become so busy with so many activities that we don't really accomplish any of them very well.
I don't have all the answers as to how to fix this problem but here are some thoughts:
- Take a time audit. What are you spending your days doing and why?
- Prioritize your spiritual life and your family.
- Occasionally, plan to do nothing!
- Be productive. For me, often times the reason I end up working on things for so long is that I wasn't getting the job done when I should have. Intense focus on the task at hand means productivity.
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