Is busyness the enemy of our souls?

I recently got back from two weeks off (honeymoon!). It's amazing what time away does to the way you think, and the things you notice. You experience life in a whole different way. You come to understand that a lot of the things you've convinced yourself matter, don't matter as much. And you have time for simple pleasures you've been missing.

By coincidence, about six weeks ago, I started reading a book called Crazy Busy by Kevin DeYoung. The book's subtitle is "A (Mercifully) short book about a (Really) big problem." Here are some highlights:

• Physically demanding work can take a toll on our bodies, but it can also make us healthier. By contrast, mental strain takes a toll that can be mental and physical.
• Being extremely busy might be a sign of a bigger problem. It could mean that you secretly believe your life is meaningless; staying busy convinces you otherwise.
• Being busy doesn't equate to faithfulness or fruitfulness as a Christian.
• Pride could be driving our urge to stay busy, as we enjoy pleasing other people and the praise that comes with it.
• Saying yes to one more thing might appear noble, but deep down, the ambition might be to appear good or helpful in the eyes of others. In that case, you're not really serving others, you're serving yourself.
• Most Christians live with a low-level guilt that they are not "doing enough" to meet the needs of the world. "We know we can always pray more and give more and evangelize more, so we get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves."
• When we try to be good and helpful in meeting the needs right in front of us, we are often breaking a commitment we'd previously made. So no, it's not always noble to set everything aside to attend to the urgent; why should people you've previously committed to have to wait?
• We probably worry too much about our kids; the kind of person they turn out to be is probably more tied to their wiring than we want to admit. Yet we act as if parenting makes the child.

The bottom line of this book, and the reason I would blog about it on a site about ministry to kids, is that being busy threatens the health of our souls. While God is real and isn't going anywhere, he doesn't scream for our attention the way that TV and e-mail and social media and phone calls and marketing do.

And so that leads me to two questions:

1. Are we modeling a pace of life for kids that practically excludes God? Are we teaching by example that to be an adult is to overpack your schedule, enjoying downtime only every few months or when another appointment miraculously gets cancelled? Are we setting them up to be blind to God's presence once they get older?
2. Are we pushing them so hard now, as kids, that we're robbing them of opportunities to experience God and be in his presence?

Archibald Hart says don't be afraid of your kids being bored. It's during times of deadness that great inspiration has been born. Our brains weren't meant to operate on hyperspeed all the time. There are seasons of life where that's appropriate: finals week, meeting a really important deadline, making last-minute preparations for an event you're hosting. But when life becomes an endless series of deadlines? That's dangerous, because it overloads our body's ability to manage stress.

One thing Carlsbad did really well was to plan for open spaces. There's lots going on in our city - neighborhoods, businesses, parks, schools, and more and more traffic - but there are also vast tracts of undeveloped land scattered throughout. And if the plan holds, it'll be that way forever. Why? Because it helps bring calm to what could otherwise turn overwhelming. Business is good, but that doesn't mean there isn't a limit. New homes are good, but that doesn't mean they belong everywhere.

In the same way, all of the things that constitute busyness in our lives are good things - within limits. Overdone, we miss out on what should be filling the "nothingness". Which seems like an oxymoron; in fact, because God is always with us, He's the one thing that's still there when everything else fades away. If we never carve out spaces for that nothing, how will kids encounter the God who lives there?