Busyness
The busyness of this life has prevented me from sending you and email for almost two months. That is horrible. I have several things to share but I just have not had the time to sit down and concentrate long enough to get it done.

We have to be so careful with this. This age we live in is all consuming. I think one of Satan’s great tricks is to keep the treadmill of life on earth spinning as fast as he can. He knows that if we are consumed with being busy that we have very little time for silence. Busyness can be a weapon of the enemy – to keep us so busy, so distracted that we cannot see what is truly going on around us nor have time to commune with God.

But as much as busyness can be a tool of the enemy, silence is often a great tool of the Lord. God wants us alone and silent so we can hear him. Do you know just how hard it is to find silence? Even if you go off in the woods, odds are you’ll hear a far off dog barking or be distracted with distant road noise or the chirping of some blue jay. Silence is golden and, therefore, very hard to come by.

I wake up everyday to a clock radio. Once I exit the fog of sleep, my next action is to turn on the TV to see the latest business news (hey, it’s my job is the reasoning here). Shower, shave and get dressed and go eat breakfast with the kids. My first action in the kitchen every morning is to check my phone for overnight emails. Most mornings, the kitchen is filled with the sounds of Fox News. I get in my truck to go to work….XM radio is on. I come to work and I turn on the computers and log in to Bloomberg TV. The phones ring and I am surrounded by noise for the next 10 hours. I come home, visit with Shannon and the girls. We eat dinner, talk and usually watch TV. In the interim and all during the day, my cell phone is at my side and I am frequently texting answers back to clients. The next morning, the cycle starts all over. I go hard from 7am Monday until about 6pm on Friday – that is almost 55 hours a week in motion, on the move, responding to the world, email at my side, taking phone calls, meeting with clients being just….well...busy. 55 hours a week, 51 weeks out of the year. Please don’t hear me boasting in this. There is no manliness in this kind of life. This isn’t a testosterone-laced, type-A, Rambo talking here….this kind of life is sickening and a whole bunch of us are doing it.

It is exhausting just thinking about – just typing it.

In all of this, it is very hard to find silence. I crave it. But I know that silence won’t find me. I have to make time for it and for God. Don’t get me wrong, I talk to God all the time – all during the day – brief little snippets here and there. But what God craves and what I so desperately need is quality, alone time.

We have to be deliberate and purposeful to find the time to be silent. A few years ago I set out to retrench a bit. I gave up the lie that in order to be successful, we had to be really involved in the community… “to give back” is what they all say - almost to try to capture you in some sort of duty... obligation... guilt. And so, I exited all the boards and committees I served on. Just a few weeks ago, I quit the Rotary Club after a decade of “having” to attend something every Wednesday at lunch. My Wednesdays are still too busy but I have removed at least one obstacle in my path towards silence. I now have that hour free of obligation. I’m not sure it will lead to an hour of prayer time with God, but I know I had no chance of silence sitting in the Trade Center every Wednesday at noon with 350 other Rotarians.

The lie of the world is that we have to be successful and that in order to be successful, we have to be busy. The busier we are…the more successful we’ll be. As a pastor once told me, "If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat". Many Christians quote the Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” and take that verse as a sort of prosperity gospel. In today’s paper there was a story about a local author featuring her new book, Will Jesus buy me a double wide (‘Cause I need more room for my plasma TV). I just bought the book. She made a great point about the prosperity gospel and Jeremiah 29:11. She was asked, “Don’t you believe God wants to bless you?” She replied, “Yes, just not in U.S. currency.”

So we run ourselves to death chasing this prosperity lie – that God wants to bless us in US dollars and we don’t even see that in so doing, we have lost the sound of silence and time alone with the Creator.

May you take this and find some silence. May we be deliberate in prioritizing our lives not around things and status and currency but in the one true thing that lasts – our relationship with God.

Soar!