November 29, 2011

• busy. busy. dreadfully busy.

  "I had worked for many years with rickety logic: religious busyness is the same thing as spiritual maturity. The more you do, the more you love Jesus. I'd never have put it that tactlessly. But it was the air I breathed, the water I drank. It was an undisclosed and unexamined conviction that drove and colored everything I did.

  "But I started to notice that religious busyness tends to make those of us caught up in it not deeper, wiser, kinder, but more shrill, more opinionated, more judgmental. I could find -you could too- counterexamples to this. But I noticed enough 'committed' people who we......re also cranky people that my unspoken theory- busyness equals maturity- grew increasingly flimsy.

  "...If doing many things is not true Christlikeness, what is? Obviously fruit. 'By your fruit you shall know them,' Jesus said.

  "...I knew this from way back. But I had simply joined my rickety logic to it. Busy people, 'committed' people, are fruitful people. Right?

  "But the flaws in this equation began to show. I noticed that busyness bruises, stunts, rots fruit as much as grows it. And then I saw it, hidden in plain sight: if we are to bear much fruit- if that's the goal of the Christian life- then the best model for spiritual maturity is seasons. Fruit grows in seasons, and all seasons are necessary for growing it. And seasons are as much about what is not happening as what is. It has as much to do with inactivity as with activity, waiting as with working, barrenness as with abundance, dormancy as with vitality."  (italics mine)

  ~Mark Buchanan, Spiritual Rhythm http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Rhythm-Being-Jesus-Season/dp/0310293650

  • 9:06 pm
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