Slow down, I want to get off

I gave a talk on busyness at a men’s group last night. Here’s what I said …

1. Have you ever been irritated because there was a queue at the supermarket till?
2. Do you regularly work thirty minutes a day longer than your contracted hours?
3. Do you check work emails and phone messages at home?
4. Has anyone ever said to you: ‘I didn’t want to trouble you because I know how busy you are’?
5. Do your family or friends complain about not getting time with you?
6. If tomorrow evening was unexpectedly freed up, would you use it to work or do a household chore?
7. Do you often feel tired during the day or do your find your neck and shoulders aching?
8. Do you often exceed the speed limit while driving?

If you mainly answered ‘yes’ then maybe you have a busyness problem.

• Over a third of people agree that ‘in the evenings I am so tired I just fall asleep on the sofa’ (Jones, 2003).
• One in five men has visited the doctor with work-related stress.
• Sixty percent of us feel our workloads are sometimes out of control. One in five feel this way most of the time.

Once upon a time people ‘convalesced’ after illness. ‘Time will heal,’ we said. Not any more. Adverts for cold remedies used to portray a patient tucked up in bed sipping a hot drink. Now they show people turning up unexpectedly at work, high on medicine to beat off the competition.

With so much going on in your lives, where can we steal some extra time from? These days eight or nine hours sleep seems positively feckless. And so on average we sleep one hour less than we need each night. Although the need for sleep can vary from six to ten hours between different individuals, s require on average eight hours. In fact the average night’s sleep is 7.04 hours. That’s down two hours from the 1910 average! No wonder we’re all so tired.

Previous generations measured their lives with diaries. Today we apportion our lives with minutes. Letters were dated, now emails are clocked to the second. In our mobile phone culture people expect to be able to talk to us at anytime anywhere. The number of people who ‘always feel rushed’ jumped 50% between the 1960s and 1990s (Putnam, 2000).

In 2004 artist Michael Gough created an exhibition entitled ‘Iconography’. An actor dressed as an archetypal Jesus posed around London, blessing passers-by while Gough discretely photographed the results. ‘No-one engages him in conversation,’ Gough comments. ‘People in the City have appointments to honour, meetings to attend, deals to make, lunch to buy.’ We are too busy for Jesus.

I used to think my busyness problem was temporary. I was busy just at that moment, but it wouldn’t last. Somewhere over the rainbow life would slow down. This month was busy, but next month looked better and my diary for the month after was almost empty. But of course a couple of months down the line my diary had filled up like every other month. Things don’t change of their own accord. Working a bit harder to get ahead doesn’t work either. There are other pressures going on that fill time as soon as we create it – like dry sand falling back into a hole while we frantically dig faster. The fact is, if you want to tackle your busyness, you will need to make deliberate choices.

Why are we busy?
For most us, our busyness is self-induced.

I think parents of young children are just going to be tired. That’s life! (I remember when my youngest daughter was about five thinking that I felt kind of strange. At first I couldn’t work out why and then I realised it was because I didn’t feel tired!)

But for most us our busyness is self-induced.

I don’t mean we decide in the morning: ‘Today, I’m going to overwork.’ But I do think our busyness is the result of the choices we make and the desires we nurture.

We never think of it like that. We blame our bosses. We blame the economy. We blame the government. We blame our wives.

‘You don’t understand,’ you may be thinking. ‘I have responsibilities. I have to stay late at the office. I have to do my overtime. I have so much to do. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.’

The thing is: God put 24 hours in each day. And God doesn’t make mistakes. so the problem is not that there aren’t enough hours in the day. The problem is that you are trying to do too much. You are trying to do more than God expects of you.

Now why is that?

Let me ask you a question: How any of you have done some kind of time management training or read a time management book?

Did it help? Did it solve the problem?

I would expect most people to say that it helped, but that it didn’t solved the problem. And that’s because our problem is not just that we management time inefficiently. The problem is we are trying to do too much. There are things going on in our hearts that make us overwork. We are trying to do more than God expects.

There are many reasons why we are busy. They’ll be different issues for different people.

Some of us are busy because we think we need the money. But need it for what? Most of in this room do not need extra money to make ends meet. And we do not need it to be happy – because in fact it is making us stressed. We ‘need’ it because we think an extra holiday, a flashier car, a bigger house will make us happy. But true joy comes from knowing God. ‘A man’s life,’ said Jesus, ‘does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.’ (Luke 12:15) Think about the contented people you know and see whether Jesus isn’t right.

Some of us are busy because we need to be in control. We worry about the future. ‘We don’t need the money now, but who knows what the future may bring,’ we say. Or worry about people. We think they need us. But we are not in control of the world. We cannot solve every problem. We are not saviours and we are not God. But the good news is that God is God! We have a Father in heaven who controls the world and cares for his people.

Some of us are busy because we can’t say ‘No’. We crave people’s approval or we fear people’s rejection. The Bible calls this ‘the fear of man’. And the good news is that God is bigger. And living for him sets us free from being controlled by other people’s approval or disapproval.

I’m busy because I need to prove myself

I want to focus on one particular issue. Many of us are busy because we feel the need to prove ourselves.

But first a bit of history.

In the medieval worldview a person was justified proved themselves right before God through religious works. And the best way to do that, people thought, was to become a monk. So you left behind the real world and went off to prayer.

Now the great driving force behind the Protestant Reformation was a rediscovery of what the Bible actually says about being right with God. The Bible says that we become right with God through what God has done – and not through what we do at all. Let me show you:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no-one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

[God our Saviour] saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy … so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3:5,7)

And that meant you didn’t have to go off into a monastery to become right with God. Instead, God made you right with him as a gift. And then you lived out your new identity in everyday life. You got stuck in, serving God in the real world. People often talk about the ‘Protestant work ethic’. The Protestant work ethic is the commitment to ordinary life and ordinary work that arose because of the value given to all of life by the Reformation. Being Christian was not going off away from life. It was serving God in the real world.

Today the Protestant work ethic is often said to be the underlying cause of the stress-filled world of modern work. As we become a culture of workaholics, Christianity is blamed. But the problem is not the Protestant work ethic. The problem is what happened next in the story.

In the Protestant vision work was one way you served God. Rest was another way. What mattered was serving God. What mattered was what God has done for us, making us right with him through the of Jesus.

But along came secularisation and God was taken out of the picture.

Now we find meaning through work itself. Our sense of being a person of worth is found not through our relationship to God but through work itself. People started to justify themselves through their secular jobs or roles. We answer the question, ‘What do you do?’ with a job title. We answer the question, ‘What are you worth?’ with a salary figure. This creates the drive to work and work and work. Your identity depends on it. And so we work on, even though it is harming our health, our families and our relationships. ‘We don’t want to rest because we want to be indispensable. We don’t want to stop being productive because our identities are rooted in activity and accomplishment’ (Baab, 2005).

And there’s one important sense in which the information revolution makes this even worse. Work for most of us is much more interesting. We’re not just on a factory production line doing the same thing over and over again. But it has created even greater expectation. We want work to be fulfilling. The value of work is measured by the sense of self-fulfilment it brings. Work is judged not by the service it renders to others, but by the service it renders to me, the worker. We look for salvation (meaning, fulfilment and honour) through ‘rewarding’ jobs.

Meaning-through-work is well suited to the goals of business. Management gurus like Tom Peters and Charles Handy have argued (2004) that ‘a huge reserve of energy and commitment could be tapped by a corporation which offers its management a chance to make … not just money, but meaning for people’. As Peter’s puts in his book In Search of Excellence: ‘We desperately need meaning in our lives and will sacrifice a great deal to institutions that will provide meaning for us’ (Bunting, 2004). Management gurus and management books no longer tell us how to chair a good meeting or make a good product. Now they promise to release your inner potential so you can find meaning and fulfilment. They offer salvation from within. Companies speak in religious language of identity, meaning, mission and values.

Madeline Bunting in her book on overwork, Willing Slaves, says:

A work ethic has evolved that promotes a particular sense of self and identity which meshes neatly with the needs of market capitalism, through consumption and through work. Put at its simplest, narcissism and capitalism are mutually reinforcing. What is pushed to the margin are the time-consuming, labour-intensive human relationships, and doing nothing – simply being. Clever organizations exploit this cultural context, this craving for control, self-assertion and self-affirmation, and design corporate cultures which meet the emotional needs of their employees … The cleverness of the fit between the project of the self and this work ethic is that it is self-reinforcing. There is no resting point: the project of the self is never complete, and is always riddled with anxiety and insecurities.

‘There is no resting point.’ That’s because what she calls ‘the project of the self’ is an idolatrous project and idols never satisfy. The secret is to call time on the ‘project of the self’ and turn back to God. This is what the Bible calls repentance. ‘There is no resting point’ for those seeking salvation through work. But Jesus says: ‘Come to me and I will give you rest.’

One senior pastor described to me how people say to him: ‘We didn’t trouble you because we know how busy you were.’ He realized they were in effect saying: ‘You’re important so you must be busy.’ Busyness is a sign of virtue and value. Busyness is next to godliness. A friend in his early forties asked me recently: ‘Why are so many twenty-year-olds tired all the time?’ The answer may be that they live in a culture of tiredness in which people think being tired is inevitable and normal. Our grandparents saw leisure as a sign of status. But now overwork is a sign of status. The constant interruptions of mobile phones, the presence of business papers on the train, the laptop on holiday – all make us feel important and valuable. Young people really do feel tired, but often it’s self-generated, maybe even psychosomatic, because if you’re not tired then you’re not worthwhile.

The truth: justification by grace

There’s nothing wrong with being busy. Most of us enjoy being busy. What creates stress is the feeling that we cannot meet the expectations of others or of God. But Jesus offers rest from the burden of self-justification. We are accepted by God. This is how we find meaning and value. At the most fundamental level, Tim Chester is a justified sinner. I’m not fundamentally a writer, or preacher, or even a husband and father. I am a sinner saved by grace and all I contribute to that identity is the sin bit. I don’t need to prove myself as a sinner saved by grace. Instead I praise the gracious embrace of the Father, the complete atonement of the Son and the Spirit’s enabling presence. This is who I am. And it’s a gift. I don’t need to earn it.

A church member once said to his pastor: ‘I phoned you on Monday, but there was no reply.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the pastor, ‘Monday is my day off.’ ‘A day off!’ replied the church member with self-righteous indignation. ‘The devil doesn’t take a day off.’ ‘That’s right,’ said the pastor, ‘and if I didn’t take any time off, I’d be just like him.’ The devil cannot rest. Only those justified by grace can truly rest.

A youth worker was complaining to me of being tired. It turned out he was getting up at six each morning because it made him feel more holy. ‘Isn’t the of Christ enough?’ I asked. ‘Do you really have to finish off what Christ left undone by getting up early?’ In the temple the work of atonement was never done. ‘Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.’ But Jesus ‘offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God’ (Hebrews 10:11-12). Jesus has sat down. He has done all that is required. So we can sit down as well. We don’t have to be up and about trying to make atonement.

‘So what can I do about my busyness?’ Perhaps that’s what you hoped I would tell you. But the question itself is flawed. What if I told you five things you could do about your busyness. Where would that leave you? With five extra things to fit into your schedule, you’d be busier than ever! Busyness is one problem we can’t solve by doing more! But the situation is not hopeless. We’re not doomed to be busy. Someone has done something about our busyness – the Lord Jesus Christ. You don’t need to ‘do’ more to overcome busyness because Jesus has already done all that is required. ‘It is finished’ he cried. ‘The job is done. The work is complete.’