Meditation: The Danger of Busyness
When God came into the world at Christmas, people didn’t have time. They were too busy. There was no room for Him in the inn. “He came unto his own, and they that were his own people received him not.” And it seems that still today we have no room. We crowd Him out with so many things, especially with our busyness.
In Luke 14:16-24, the Lord Jesus tells a parable about busy people. A man-He said-gave a banquet and sent out invitations. One by one those who were invited to the banquet offered their excuse for not being able to come. They were all too busy; one with his farm, one with his wife, and another with his oxen, What Jesus is saying here is that man can become so busy making a living that he can neglect to make a life. God can be crowded out so easily by the trivial and the frivolous. The things that matter most are at the mercy of the things that matter least. Jesus is telling us also that important duties in life that keep us from God are not duties at all but sins.
The people in the parable all made excuses. And all were pleas of being busy with their affairs. C.S. Lewis, that very wise Christian, remarks somewhere that the devil captures many not by preventing their spiritual encounters with God, but by whispering at precisely the right moment that just now they are too busy. Another time perhaps?
How true is the proverb: “When the devil can’t make you bad, he makes you busy.”
One of the main purposes of Advent is to help us carve out time to focus and prepare for the coming of the Savior into our hearts.
Meditation: Speed is Not Everything
One of Calvin Coolidge’s classic one-liners was: “The business of America is busyness.” Americans have a reputation the world over for being busy. The name for the white man in Kenya, for example, means “one who runs around in circles.” I remember another Kenyan who said to an American missionary who had a wrist watch. “You Americans have watches. We Kenyans have the time.” We need to realize that speed isn’t everything. If it were, rabbits would rule the world. “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” said Ghandi. Strange isn’t it: We Americans who have more labor saving devices in our homes than any other people in the world, complain most that we have no time!
Could it be that the result of all this fast living is fast dying? Listen to these words of a pastor: “On a Friday night, a man boasted to me that he had not taken a vacation in twenty-five years. He was too busy selling insurance. The following Monday I conducted his funeral. He died of a heart attack.”
Fast living. Fast dying. And the tragedy of it all is that we miss the heavenly banquet. We miss the greatest gift of all-eternal life through Christ our Lord.
Advent: a time to prioritize our busyness, slow down and place first things first.
Meditation: God is Busy-For Us!
We expect that God should have time for us-and He does, because if God is ever busy, He is busy for us and on behalf of us! But most of us have no time for Him! Perhaps we should face the deeper implications of this, i.e., if we are never alone with God, it is not because we are too busy: it is because we don’t care for Him. God is not a priority for us. And we had better face the facts. “Your date book is your creed,” someone said. “What you believe in, you have time for.”
Advent: a time to interrupt our busyness, a time to live, to love, to look above, so that one day we may hear the Father inviting us, “Come. O blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
~ Presbytera Emily Harakas & Fr. Anthony Coniaris, DAILY MEDITATIONS and Prayers for the CHRISTMAS ADVENT Fast and Epiphany: Living the Days of Advent and Epiphany according to the Orthodox Church Calendar
