Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul

by Brady Boyd

Here’s what will change our rhythms, our pace, our lives: revelation from the Spirit of God, or, in other words, the ability to detect spiritually what we’ve had only sensory knowledge of before.

Speed is the single greatest threat to a healthy life, and it is also our greatest defense.

When God said that rest is found in him, he means that rest is found in him. Translation: real rest is found nowhere else.

This is why God’s invitation is so profound, the invitation to come to him to find our rest: he can actually deliver on what he promises, something the world never will be able to do.

This one little conversation, this one extra phone call, this one quick meeting, what can it cost? But it does cost, it drains yet another drop of our life. Then, at the end of days, weeks, months, years, we collapse, we burn out, and cannot see where it happened. It happened in a thousand unconscious events, tasks, and responsibilities that seemed easy and harmless on the surface but that each, one after the other, used a small portion of our precious life.

We run around like crazed Marthas, forgetting entirely that it was Mary whom Jesus praised.

engage, engage, engage, withdraw … engage, engage, engage, withdraw. Rhythmic—that’s how Jesus lived. It’s how we’re invited to live too.

What has always been most notable about Jesus’s voluntary withdrawals is not that he rested but when he chose to rest. He withdrew to rest when people still needed him and also when his ego would have been tempted to stay. Jesus didn’t merely rest when rest was expected; he also rested when he was at the top of his game.

“The only real antidote to the clamor of the crowd is time in the wilderness, where our true identity can be established and we can hear the still, small voice of God.”

what are your top three takeaways about rhythmic living that, had you known sooner, could have saved you a boatload of pain and grief, and spinning, out-of-control days?

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t. —Richard Bach

mission requires margin. I won’t help another in need until I first create the space that helpfulness requires.

Think about it. If you and I had margin, if we weren’t chronically stressed out, if we weren’t forever dashing from here to there to there … I wonder what we’d do differently, what we’d attempt, who we’d become.

retreat, refresh your soul, and renew your focus. That’s it—the three tenets of effective rest.

Yes, it’s true that we can’t give what we don’t have, but equally true is that we can give what we do.