The Remedy for Busyness

Perhaps because of the well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son, we often think of prodigals as those who have wandered from a relationship with God in pursuit of bright lights, sexual immorality, or drunkenness. While that may be the case with many young people tasting freedom from their parents’ oversight for the first time, I don’t find the same lures, or at least initial lures, are drawing large numbers of people 30+ years old from God.

Instead, it’s busyness that snares most of us. Whether it’s work, parenting, sports, entertainment… or all of the above, our lack of margin drifts us away from Christ.

Then as we find his nature of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) waning and the sinful nature of anxiety, frustration, irritability, impatience, rudeness, and poor self-control surfacing, we convince ourselves that we’re too busy for a life of faith, it is neither doable nor relevant, and we continue our drift from the Lord.

Perhaps we’re right in one aspect. It’s a waste of time to simply try harder to consistently be more patient, joyful, loving or kind. It’s like deciding to win a marathon this week with no preparation simply by trying hard. It’s not going to happen. So, in the middle of our busyness, if we simply try hard, we are bound to fall short.

But Jesus called us to follow him. What if that’s as much about engaging in his practices, doing what he did, than it is about reflecting his nature to others? What if his practices, those things he did consistently, served as preparations for those moments that seem impossible to us?

I once heard Dallas Willard refer to spiritual maturity as “doing effortlessly what Jesus would do if he were in my place.”

In the same way that one cannot simply will oneself to dunk a basketball or squat 350 pounds effortlessly, it may be done through engaging in the practices that prepare one for such a task.  

Not one of us have more demands on us than Jesus had on him. He had twelve direct reports. Everywhere he went people followed. There were expectations, antagonists, timelines, desperate needs, and intentional traps. Yet, again and again, we see him in the Gospels retreating to solitude and silence. Mark, who wrote the shortest Gospel, and skipped the story of Jesus’ birth in his enthusiasm to tell us about the death and resurrection, gave us 21 glimpses in 16 chapters of Jesus’ practice of solitude and silence. It was important to Mark because it was important to Jesus.

Modern neurobiologists are confirming that this pattern of consistently withdrawing in solitude and silence modeled by Jesus over 2000 years ago leads to our healthiest cognitive and emotional states. Their studies show that emotional stability and elasticity as well as cognitive performance wanes as irritability, poor self-control, anxiety, and resentment gain without the consistent transitions between engagement and solitude and silence. In other words, if busyness can lure us away from the Lord, our way back may be through the practice of intentional, consistent solitude and silence.  

What if you prioritized a minimum of 30 minutes a day without any human generated interaction or distraction? Just be alone with your thoughts and God. This is not the classic “quiet time” focused on Scripture, study, and prayer. Those are solid practices. But what if you developed a consistent time of just turning everything off and being alone with your thoughts and God? You won’t know the difference it could make unless you try it.