Busyness

I would just like to use these lines of blog space to remind myself, and you my lovely blog reader, that busyness is not necessarily a virtue.

It's been striking me lately how much having "plans" or "something to do" seems like such a good thing all the time. And how if I'm ever caught on one of those high-property-value nights with nothing to do (i.e., Friday and Saturday), then I think I am a loser. More than that, I've just been noticing lately how sometimes we wear our busyness like a badge of honor. We say things like "I had so many things to get to today I didn't even have time to eat!" or "These days there have just been so many things to do and not enough time to do them." Somehow this makes us feel important.

Since my probable next stop on this journey of life (a L'Arche community) moves at a much slower pace than the rest of the world, I'm going to have to try to hop off the busyness train. But it's not as easy as it would seem--because that idol of plans, schedules, and filling time with stuff is hard to get rid of.

It's easy to *say* there is nothing truly important in this world but loving God and loving people; but it's much harder to intentionally arrange my life so there is really adequate wiggle room for both of those things to happen with daily and abundant regularity. The hard part is to have the strength and wisdom to lay aside the temporary feeling of fullness that comes from a busy schedule, and to do the hard work of cultivating the fullness which can only be found in loving (which often doesn't happen according to a schedule at all).