busyness on Fullness of Life

He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out the plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

Aren’t you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, jo...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the...

In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling describes the challenge of experiencing God’s presence, even in the relatively slow world (in comparison to our own) of the fourteenth-century: ...

There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by an...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

This busy world will surge about you with the tread of restless feet and the throb of restless hearts. And little that you will do will seem to make a pause in the rush of things. But you may in Chris...

The Japanese have a word, ikigai, that captures this sense of drive we all have inside us. Roughly translated as “the happiness of constant busyness,” ikigai reflects your awareness of your life’s pur...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the true heart of the problem related to the complexity of our lives: Let me fir...

Recently I was running the vision of our church by my thera­pist, who is this Jesus-loving, ubersmart PhD. Our dream was to re-architect our communities around apprenticeship to Jesus. (That feels so ...

Gratitude and wonder are squeezed out when our lives are packed full with busyness and responsibilities…There is simply no room, no time to notice. We experience God’s gifts when we pause long enough ...

Busyness allows us to avoid the deepest questions of our souls. It keeps us at arm's length from our truest, most authentic selves. And when we don't know our deepest, most authentic selves, w...

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Here is a spiritual peculiarity to explore: that eternity is what we crave, and the first thing our disillusioned brains think to do is cram it into the hours of the working week.

Several times during the day, but especially in the morning and evening, ask yourself for a moment if you have your soul in your hands or if some passion or fit of anxiety has robbed you of it.... If ...

Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...

Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We thi...

The press of busyness is like a charm. Its power swells. . . . It reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever-younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retir...

Dear Lord, We come to you this evening with great expectations. Expectations that your Son Jesus has been born, and that his life is a light for us and all people. We come with expectations that He c...

They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.

Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I for...

Gracious and Heavenly Father, In your word, you call us to be comforted first and foremost by You. But often, if we are honest, we look for comfort in different places. We look for comfort in our b...

Sometimes we are not present because we are trying to play God—we move too fast and try to accomplish too much without acknowledging the limitations of our humanity and the constraints of our time. . ...

Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

My hurry is what often makes the yoke of life and ministry heavier than Jesus means it to be.