Too Busy?

/


I’ve heard it so often that I fear it’s become part of our national vernacular.

Every time I hear it I cringe just a little because the same words have come out of my mouth a time or twenty.

“I’m too busy.”

Have you said it? Have you thought it? Have you suffered from it?

Most recently, those words have crushed me. A friend told me she was just too busy to read my blog. She didn’t know about something that had happened in my life, and I jokingly said, “If you read my blog you’d know.”

*wink, wink*

My friend shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’m on the computer all day, and I’m just too busy to read blogs.”

Ooooo.K.

But I hear it other places too.

Too busy to play with my kids. Too busy to help out at church. Too busy to serve a worthy ministry. Too busy to just hang out.

Too busy.

We’re raising an entire generation that is just too busy. All the time. And I worry about what that is doing to our kids. I wonder if they are growing up with this sense of being busied about, run here and there for the sake of being busy. I wonder if that’s what kids today think is normal, and that if they weren’t very busy one day will they feel like less of a human being?

And I wonder if someday our kids will be so programmed to think their lives are so overwhelmingly busy (or “important” because isn’t that a word that could be substituted for “busy” sometimes?) that they won’t have time for us, their parents.

But I also wonder if this “busyness” is something else.

A way to justify our existence? If we weren’t busy, would we not be necessary?

A way to get out of something we don’t want to do? Think about it, if we’re too busy, we don’t have to get our hands dirty doing this thing that’s just too hard.

A convenient excuse? Does our busyness justify our mistakes? Our shortcomings? Our overlooking good friends?

Whatever it is, I think it has to stop. Even though we may be busy (and, face it, we all are), I think we need to stop complaining about it.

I think my husband is the best example of this. He has a job that is pretty demanding. He has responsibility over a lot of people. His days are full. In fact, one day last week he had seven meetings back-to-back. Seven! I can’t even imagine that.

And yet, I have never heard my husband complain about being too busy.

He comes home, he turns off his cell phone, and he rests as much as he can. He also digs in and gets his hands dirty, volunteering in many ways. Last week, the same week in which he had seven back-to-back meetings, he also was out four evenings in a row—three meeting-ish things and one was a date with me. *smile*

If that were me, I’d be raising all kinds of heck about how tired I was and how I’d been pushed to my limit by all the demands on my time, but not my husband. He never said a word.

I’m challenging myself to stop using the words, “I’m too busy” because the fact of the matter is that I am not. There is always more time, more room in my schedule, more of me to go around. I can make time to help someone else or to hang out with a friend.

And if I have a day in which I’m not too busy, I will say a prayer of thanks and enjoy the blessing, but I will not think I am of lesser value because of it.

Because I know tomorrow will be full . . . but not too busy.

Linking this post to Amanda's Weekend Bloggy Reading party at Serenity Now.

Shelly



Like what you see here? Want to be sure to get updates every day? Why not follow me? Or sign up for email updates? It's free!