"Busy": The New "Good"?

          Well, it's been quiet on this ol' blog.  Late last October I agreed to write the daily devotionals that are published in the Beacon Lights magazine, and, frankly, that doesn't leave me much time for any other writing.  I do have a short series of articles that ran in the Enterprise some time ago that I thought I could share here for anybody who stills bothers to check for a new post now and then.  These columns are on being busy.  (I think I need to re-read them myself!  :-)

            It used to be that when someone would ask, “How are you?” or “How was your week?,” he could expect this response: “Good!”

 

That’s changed.  Now when someone asks, “How are you?,” there’s a more common response: “Busy.”  And that “busy” is often accompanied with a tone of voice or expression that leaves no room to doubt the busyness of the addressee.  We’re all so busy, busy, busy.

Yet even while we bemoan our busy state, we believe our busyness is somehow justified – maybe even pious.  We convince ourselves that we have to do everything that we are doing, while at the same time we can’t find a moment to consider another option even if there is one.

Interestingly, the four times that the word “busy” is used in the Bible (KJV), it’s used negatively, to describe people who are wandering about, refusing to work and being nosy.

In Proverbs 6 Solomon instructs his son to consider the ant.  Have you ever taken the time to watch ants?  They look so very busy as they scurry about, but if you actually crouch down and press your finger to the concrete directly in the path of a tiny ant, you realize that it is not bustling mindlessly about – it is on a serious mission.  Therefore, it will immediately bypass your obtrusive finger and press on in the direction that it was going before.

When my husband and I first married, we lived in a basement apartment.  One day we noticed a two-lane trail of ants – one lane emerging and the other returning from under the trim of our kitchen window.  Those ants marched like little black soldiers across the kitchen wall and up into the ceiling.  We went upstairs to discover their destination, and we found it: the sticky, crumb-loaded tray beneath our landlords’ toaster.  Those ants by-passed all tempting morsels in our kitchenette downstairs and trekked what must have been many ant miles in order to reach their destination.  They would not be thwarted from their difficult task.

Ants are not busy, they are diligent.

Likewise, we are called not to be busy, but to be diligent.  And there is a difference.

Consider:

Psalm 119:4: “Thou hast commanded us to keep Thy precepts diligently.”

Hebrews 11:6b:  “He [God] is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”

Proverbs 4:23: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”

2 Peter 1:5-10: “And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.  For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure…”