- “People do not think, and yet thinking is living, and one of the nearest approaches to death is to be without thought. Gentle reader, do you never think? Are you too busy to meditate? Is your time occupied from morning to night? Then stay a moment while we whisper in your ear: if you are very busy, think and pray all the more, or your work will wear and weary you, and drag you away from God. For your work’s sake, break away from it, and give the soul a breathing time. Get a holy subject and keep to it till you have drawn somewhat from it to feed your soul upon, and then you will do your lifework with less fatigue because you will have more strength to spend upon it.” Charles Spurgeon on being too busy Flowers from a Puritan’s Garden
Spurgeon on being too busy.
- “Busyness also seems to be a determination not to “miss out on life.” Behind much of the rat-race of modern life is the unexamined assumption that what I do determines who I am. In this way, we define ourselves by what we do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside. It is typical in a party for one stranger to approach another with the question, “What do you do?” Perhaps we wouldn’t have a clue how to reply to the deeper question, “Who are you?” James M. Houston in The Transforming Friendship: A Guide to Prayer.
- “Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A slothful man may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell . . . people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.” Frederick Buechner – Wishful Thinking
4“Busyness can ruin our joy. As Christians, our lives should be marked by joy (Phil. 4:4), taste like joy (Gal. 5:22), and be filled with the fullness of joy (John 15:11). Busyness attacks all that. One study found that commuters experience greater levels of stress than fighter pilots or riot police… There’s no doubt that when our lives are frantic and frenzied we are more prone to anxiety, resentment, impatience, and irritability.” Kevin DeYoung in Three Dangers of Being Crazy Busy
5. “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Rather than commanding us to try harder to find him, God tells us to be still and know him. Stop. Enough. Cease striving. Because he is God and he is moving and doing glorious things in both the sunshine and the rain, whether we stop and notice or not. We must not miss out because our hearts are too busy.” – Bonnie McKernan
6. “Busyness is moral laziness [because it is often a statement of our self-importance and our excuse to be inattentive to people]. . . . But God has given us just enough time to do what we need to do moment by moment to respond to him. And his grace is there; it is eternally present. Every moment is a sacrament where time touches eternity and there is exactly enough time to do what God has called us to do.” – Bruce Hindmarsh
7. “Busyness is like sin: kill it or it will be killing you. Most of us fall into a predictable pattern. We start to get overwhelmed by one or two big projects. Then we feel crushed by the daily grind. Then we despair of ever feeling at peace again and swear that something has to change. Then two weeks later life is more bearable, and we forget about our oath until the cycle starts all over again. What we don’t realize is that all the while, we’ve been a joyless wretch, snapping like a turtle and as personally engaging as a cat. When busyness goes after joy, it goes after everyone’s joy.” Kevin DeYoung in Three Dangers of Being Crazy Busy
8. “In our culture, we are defined by our function in life – by what we do and our position on the tribal totem pole. We try to manipulate things to suit ourselves, so that we come out on top. These conscious and unconscious drives work against a spirit of prayer, where we seek God’s will rather than our own, and where we need to be still and listen to God rather than pump ourselves full of the narcotic of busyness. The words of one of the Psalms, “My soul finds rest in God alone,” are death to a spirit of self importance and restless ambition.” James M. Houston in The Mentored Life.
9. “We must have some room to breathe…Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has the time to listen, let alone love. Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high-speed good intentions. Is God now pro-exhaustion? Doesn’t He lead people beside the still waters anymore? Who plundered those wide-open spaces of the past, and how can we get them back? There are no fallow lands for our emotions to lie down and rest in.” Richard Swenson in: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical,
Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives
10. “If we were to ask many a person who claims to be a Christian, “How long is it since you enjoyed real communion with Jesus?” he would find it difficult to answer. The great mass of those who claim to be Christians are too much taken up with the world, too busy, too careful, too frivolous, or too unbelieving. They could feast every day upon the bread of heaven, but they prefer to starve or fill their mouths with the husks of earth; they might dwell in the palace of the great King, but they are content to abide in the smoke-grimed tents of Kedar. Was there ever a drearier infatuation? Milton (Paradise Lost) pictures the fallen angel as wearing in Eve’s dwelling place the form of a toad, but how much greater is the degradation when the Bride of Christ prefers to wear the appearance of a mole or an earthworm! It is shameful for an heir of heaven to choose this musty, mildewed world, and neglect the ever fresh and sparkling beauties of Immanuel. Our place is in the Saviour’s embrace, and there always and for ever. There is no need for us to suspend our communion with Christ, and no need can ever arise. The order of the Lord’s household never renders it necessary that the bride of Christ should be on ill terms with her husband; all that damages their fellowship is outside of the Lord’s arrangements and sinful. Never shall it be said “You have abided long enough in this mount.” For ever here our rest must be. Jesus wearing the memorials of his dying love, and clothed with the glories of his risen life, should be our perpetual company, his presence the sum which warms us, his love the atmosphere we breathe, his words our food, himself our all in all.” Charles Spurgeon, The Sword and Trowel, 145–146, slightly modernized in language.
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