The Oppression of Busyness (1)

This is an extension of a tweet I posted earlier today.

This is the original tweet:

Most "busyness" in today's world is based on pride, low self-esteem, fear and lack of faith. Most of it rarely produces anything of value.

This is a paraphrase and summary of some things I had been reading by Dallas Willard. It is also something I have been noticing been played out in my community.

We lived in downtown Vancouver for 7 years. The downtown of any major city tends to be busy and move fast. People's inner worlds tended to synchronize with this external reality.

We now live in the suburbs of Vancouver. We live on the edge of a forest. My old home office was on the 26th floor and overlooked the helter skelter movements of downtown Vancouver. My current office is in our town-home basement and I have a view of the forest - the only action I see is the occasional glare from the neighborhood cat.

Where we now live is quite peaceful, quiet and serene. But, strangely the lives of most of the people do not correspond with this reality. I find people are stretched in a million directions between family demands, work demands, social demands and the demands that spring from untended inner neuroses.

As a pastor, I see this most played out with how people treat the Sunday morning worship service. (I know - I am completely partial here - no pretense of objectivity on my part).

Basically, people are driven by things other than the pursuit of God.

This has been proven to me through the experience of someone who attends a church in another city, but is still in contact with me for pastoral counsel from time to time. This individual is extremely driven in their particular career. He owns his own business, and as a result makes his own hours. Yet - with this freedom - he has not attended a Sunday morning service in over 2 and a half months. (He has made a profession of faith, states his love for Jesus and respect for those in leadership at his church).

When I pushed him on this - he said he was busy with work - which in his line of work is true - a lot of his business does take place on Sunday.

Busy with work. But.... why? He is actually quite financially stable and I know missing 2-3 hours on a Sunday morning won't threaten his business. Why is he so driven? Why is he so "busy"?

I sense that there is something deeper that drives our business. I listed some of them in the tweet:

pride, fear, low self-esteem and lack of faith.

Instead of examining each of them, maybe I will spread this blog out over a few posts.

Pride - I pushed my friend on his lack of church attendance, although he still professes his Christian faith. At one point, I told him -

"So , basically, given the choice - you would rather be selling houses,

than worship God".

He back-tracked and tried to sputter out some defenses, but I held my ground, because I knew I was right. Finally, he revealed to me that he lived this life where he HAD to hit his sales targets and be #1.

A-ha - now we were getting somewhere. I suspect if we spend some more time talking, we would start to uproot some deep roots that have flowered up into this pride.

Note - I have changed details about my friend, so that it would be next to impossible to figure out who he is - all the details have been changed - maybe including "his" gender!

Next post will be on some possible resolutions to stepping off the busyness tread-mill, that has the power to threaten everything we value.