Busyness - Part 2

Are we too busy for God? Are YOU too busy to cultivate your relationship with God?

In my last blog entry, I asked this of us. How do the schedule we keep and the priorities we hold affect areas of our relationship with God such as prayer? I believe that God has placed us where and when we are to be able to find Him and live a life of relationship with Him (see Acts 12:26-27 for a biblical basis for this belief). If this is so, our circumstances will never be such that a life of prayer becomes an impossibility. In other words, there is the time and occasion to pray.

But why do our priorities become so skewed? One answer is that we are willing to accept or be satisfied with little in the spiritual realm but not satisfied in the physical realm. A great exploration of this is found in an article by Dr. Micheal Zigarelli. In the article "Too Busy for God" (link here), Dr Zigarelli uses the small Old Testament prophecy of the book of Haggai to make a profound case regarding our busyness.

In prophecies which can actually be dated right down to the exact calendar date, God spoke to the remnant of Israel who were living back in the land after the exile in Babylon. They had started to build a new temple in Jerusalem. Yet, the project was stopped for political reasons. The delay last 16 years. God used Haggai to get the people to resume the building of the temple.

Over those 16 years, the people were satisfied to have an incomplete house of God in their midst while they busied themselves with their own paneled houses. The people's priorities became inverted. The desire for the building of their own houses took assumed priority over doing the building of the temple. The question was not asked: "when can we resume buidling?"

Dr Z accurately parallels that case with our own. There is both a corporate and individual sense in which we, as believers, are the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3.16 [Group]; 1 Corinthians 6.19 [Individual]). Have we allowed the building of God's house within us to be put on hold while we pursue our own priorities first?

Please read Dr. Z's article. I think you will find it gets to the point quite well: Are we too busy for God?

Busyness - Part 1

Recently, I have been reflecting on the busyness of our lives and how it affects our life of prayer. In the course of research and reflection on this topic, I have come across a survey which demonstrates the impact of busyness on the life of the Christian. The survey, conducted by Dr. Michael Zigarelli, is international in its scope. The results actually surprised me. I was expecting that Christians in the United States would rank the highest in the indices of how much busyness affects our prayer lives. Actually, Christians in six nations other than the United States indicated a higher level of life busyness than American Christians. You can find the article here.

I do not want to be naive about history and assume that people in other eras have not faced their own levels of a high degree of busyness. Here in the United States, I have run across numerous anecdotes about pioneers who spent almost every waking "spare" moment in chopping wood for fuel (In a quick aside, the advice of building consultant Bernie Weisgerber can prove instructive. He was one of the consultants in the Public Broadcasting System reality program "Frontier House”. The show took three families and placed them into a historical recreation which simulated life in a Montana mountain valley in the year 1883. Mr. Weisgerber's counsel to the families which participated was to: “Spend every spare minute gathering winter firewood". This is not unlike the task that many of our ancestors have faced).

Yet, there is a discernible trend in our present-day world culture in which people believe that their lives are busier than they have ever been. The increased use of technology, especially in the workplace, has had the unexpected effect of either making our lives busier or giving us the impression that our lives are busier than they ever have been. One objective measure of this is the increased number of average hours per week worked by Americans which has increased about 10 hours per week over the last several decades.

How does living a life of busyness affect of lives of prayer? Are we too busy for God? Have we as Christians bought into our culture's obession of not just getting more and more but doing more and more? In part 2 of this article, I will examine a parallel which Dr. Zigarelli drew between our busyness and that of the returned Israelite exiles who lived in the time of the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. I think you will find the connection very relevant to our lives today.