“Busy” is in the eye of the beholder.
#WordOfTheWeek
I’ve been minding my Sabbath for over two months now. I’ve regained a sleep schedule, found more daily focus, and experienced many other benefits. However, I seem to have less time to do everything. Being more focused with less time on a more systematic daily schedule works well when focused on personal development, but what does being busy mean as a way of life?
They say, “You can’t complain about all the things you had on your plate when your goal was to eat,” but there certainly is such a thing as overeating, and obesity comes with a bunch of problems. The way physical heart blockages can kill you slowly or suddenly, so do metaphorical heart blockages of spiritual, mental, physical, and/or social overeating.
This past week, I committed to team leadership, group leadership, leadership education, and group membership, all in church. A spiritually full plate is an answered prayer, but it almost caused me to miss the monthly family meeting simply because I “overate.”
Then, at the family meeting, with graduations and summer season activities, I almost socially over-ate by committing to everything my huge family has planned. Thankfully, one of my awesome cousins said, “We forget all of us have a whole other side of the family,” which woke me up to the fact that while I have an entirely separate family, I also have separate social groups. As a single man, overcommitting to family events without room to go on and find a suitable partner could be a permanent social heart blockage if I’m not mindful.
Students and teachers know how valuable summer break is to personal health, and even the most hardcore gym rat has a rest day, cheat day, or date night to prevent injury, burnout, depression, and so on. Yet, regardless of how you define health, healthy people dislike idle time.
We complain about serving too much at church, stress about all the work we have, skip leg day, silence our group chats, and then throw shade when someone else gets called to leadership over us. We leave vacation days on the table, complain we are getting fat, and feel left out when our friends share group pics that we aren’t a part of. Somewhere in all of the busyness, we have to find a balance.
We can serve God and find balance in that, but for non-believer readers, it may be helpful to consider what kind of busy you are. Are you aimlessly busy, doing what society tells you to do with no goals outside of the material minutia of day-to-day life, or do you have a genuine business to mind every day attached to lofty ambitions and a bigger purpose?
Your type of “busy” says a lot about you. I have been busy with nothing to show for it in wisdom, skills, achievements, legacy, money, assets, and more. Then I have moments of not working a day of my life in certain seasons because of all the fun I was having, which translated well into practical use, resume improvements, and material things I did not even know I wanted. I have been busy to distract myself and others from my real feelings and thoughts. I have been busy solely because I was focused on something that affected who I was and the people I was associating with. That’s why, to me, “Busy” is in the eye of the beholder.
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