Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul

by Brady Boyd

To me, busyness equaled movement, and movement was necessary for me to get ahead.

So, he extended the offer, and of course I accepted. He needed me, after all. How I needed to be needed. This was an easy yes.

I would arrive early those Saturday mornings and teach outreach principles to all two hundred church families who’d come to serve, and then we’d disband to visit our adopted families. Then, several hours later, after those morning visits were completed, we’d reconvene and celebrate and tell stories of what God had done.

During those first years of marriage, Pam probably envisioned lazy Saturday mornings, late breakfasts, a few hours to enjoy life as husband and wife. Instead, she got busyness, chaos, and a husband too distracted to see straight.

I informed Pam of my new role, and not long after that, I came home to find that my wife of five years had packed her bags. I think her exact explanation was: “If I’m going to be a single woman, I’d rather be single at my parents’ house.” Admittedly, it wasn’t my best day.

In those first months at the helm of New Life, I remember sticking to my rhythmic routine. Senior staffers used to mock me for how much I rested, in fact.

if we ever can’t find you, you’re probably busy taking a nap somewhere.”

During those first few years at my new church, I worked hard at rest, and I encouraged everyone who would listen to join me.

“Speed of the leader, speed of the team; the reason your staff is exhausted and cranky is because you are behaving the very same way.”

So while I kept my optimism close at hand, as I made my way to Colorado, I wondered if I’d actually signed up to serve as a hospice nurse—somebody to provide a little dignity while the one who lays dying fades from this thing called life.

Wayne Muller wrote, “If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath—our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.”2

Interestingly, during those slow-going weeks and months following my surgery, my preaching improved. My leadership improved. My ability to think even improved.

the greatest risk to restfulness is success;

Failure invites us to pause, to regroup, to take stock, and to rest. In the sorrow, in the pain, in the deep, dark valleys we tend to find ourselves in, we are humbled, we are pensive, and we are undone. As a result, we tend to stop. But when we’re soaring up with the eagles? Well, who wants to come down from that?

But I liked how success felt. I didn’t want to unplug. I didn’t want to relax. The last thing I craved was rest.

It occurs to me that this could be why roller-coaster rides never last for more than about two minutes. We simply can’t take the adrenaline surge for much longer than that. I think this is true in life outside the amusement park as well; we’ve got to learn how to stop the ride, without sabotaging our very lives.

Even the healthiest and holiest people have some rhythms that don’t serve them well. Maybe you, too, need to chronically sign up for more than what your soul’s capacity will allow, and perhaps you also need to be needed. Maybe you consistently neglect to carve out time to spend with God each day, or you “come down” from a workweek in a less-than-stellar way.

Frazzle is when you can’t hold a thought in your mind for two seconds before it disappears into thin air. Frazzle is when you can’t concentrate on A because you start thinking about B and C. Frazzle is when there’s a washing machine in your head, and it’s permanently set on spin cycle. Frazzle is when you can’t find peace and quiet in the quietest, most peaceful place.

Sadly, for people like me anyway, those who insist on staying frazzled, we ultimately fizzle out.

“People in a hurry don’t allow time for their complex bodies and minds to become revitalized,” he wrote. “So they accelerate the wear and tear of their bodies. There is no time for contemplation or even meditation. Anxiety increases and they lose perspective on their problems because they don’t have time to think constructively. This makes them even more stressed and less able to cope with the strains of life, thus exacerbating the stress of life.

But what occurs to me is that it’s more than a little difficult to pay attention to God’s thoughts, when I can’t even pay attention to my own. Throughout the normal course of my days, if someone were to ask, “Brady, what are you thinking about?” I’d actually have to pull back for a minute and think about what I was thinking about, which tells me I wasn’t being very intentional with those original thoughts.

I crave rest for my body, yes. But more immediately, and for reasons that are now obvious, I crave it for my mind.

I want to know what God is thinking. I want to know what he is thinking about my spiritual development. I want to know his thoughts on my wife and on my kids. On my colleagues. On my friends. On my neighbors. On our world at large. How can I possibly serve his restoration agenda in this world when I can’t get a bead on his thoughts? I do want to know his thoughts, but that will require margin, space, and time.

Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.

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

We love and admire and follow these leaders because of the great gains we believe them to make, and yet we unwittingly cheer them right over the cliff, wishing them well as they crash to the ground.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. —Albert Einstein

With my phone handy, I never have to think. It tells me what to think. I don’t even have to wonder what to think about, because it tells me all the time. There is seemingly nothing this thing can’t do, and all with just a little more than a swipe of my thumb. Which is why I’m so attached. Why we are so attached.

When God said that rest is found in him, he means that rest is found in him. Translation: real rest is found nowhere else. Recently I heard a pastor in Maryland talking about the difference between amusement and rest. We tend to do one better than the other, and the one we do well is not rest. Case in point: last year my family and I went to Disney World for a full week, and I came back more exhausted than before I left. And I was really tired when we took off. I may have escaped the stressors of daily life, but had I even rested at all? This is what God is hinting at here, that restfulness is tethered to the state of our souls.

We acknowledge that a healthy heart rhythm is critical for maintaining good health. A steady heartbeat is kind of necessary, right? What we are slower to admit is that our souls require rhythm too.

We don’t hear the “underlying whisper of God’s heartbeat,” most likely because we’ve always got wired buds in our ears.

It is God’s presence that quiets our souls. It is God’s presence that calms us down.

God is not merely a peaceful person; God, in fact, is peace. When we sit in God’s presence, we’re sitting in the presence of peace.

slow can pay serious dividends, for our bodies, for our minds, and for our souls.

I felt a little like I was lollygagging with God. I didn’t turn on the TV. I didn’t crack open a book. I didn’t even fret. I simply lay there, in the presence of my Lord. Totally unproductive. Totally inefficient. And also totally, and astoundingly, at peace.

It’s tempting for extroverts such as I to believe that these little yeses don’t matter, that they don’t add to much in the end. But in fact they 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.

after enjoying a totally uneventful, totally obligation-free Friday night, I woke Saturday morning to still more hours of unscheduled time.

Officially, I was accomplishing nothing. But great gains were being made for my soul.

I conceded that I may still eat too fast, talk too fast, walk too fast, and in general live by the code that says faster beats slower every time, but at least I was making progress. I had actually withdrawn from my daily chaos and parked myself on this rickety bench, lollygagging, fascinated with God.

one fear I live with is that someday, in some way, I’ll lose my fascination with God.

when one loses his or her fascination with God, there is nothing left to be fascinated with.

Letting ourselves be who we really are is a key step in living a life at rest.

I couldn’t blame him for giving me a hard time. For so long, I was the guy standing in judgment of anyone and everyone who didn’t appear to be working as hard and as long as I did, people who had the audacity to take time off or call a workday complete as soon as their eight hours were up. When you need to be needed, you’ll willingly sign up for slavery like that.

Give this a try: The next ten people you see face-to-face, pose the question, “How ya been lately?” And then count how many times you hear this in response: “Busy. Sooo busy.” I’m willing to bet you’ll go ten for ten.

What’s not discussed in these I’m-so-busy-it-would-blow-your-mind discussions is the motivation for all that busyness. I have a theory on this, which is that busyness is our means to impress. If I’m busy, then I’m important, and if I’m important, then you’ll be impressed. Right? Don’t you do this too? A buddy calls you up and asks about having lunch sometime soon, and instead of answering succinctly, you feel compelled to give him the rundown of your (very busy, very important) week. “Well, I’ve got an off-site all day Monday, I’m in wall-to-wall meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday is an extended morning session with the board, and Thursday—well, it’s already in the tank!”

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness,” one author wrote. “Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”

Along the way, my family and I sort of institutionalized the practice of ditching impression management and working toward a quiet, gentle spirit instead. Once a week, we’d hole away for an entire day with nothing on the agenda and nobody to impress. We would wake when our bodies were done sleeping, instead of being jolted by a blaring alarm. We’d ignore the hands on the clock and open our own hands to an unscheduled day. We’d eat when we got hungry, move when we got antsy, rest when we got weary, and let the day come to us instead of maniacally chasing it down. Smartphones weren’t the rage yet, but desktop computers were, and we took pains to keep ours shut down, to experience life not virtually but firsthand, here, in real time. Mostly, we puttered. We ambled. Once a week, beautifully, we took a long, slow stroll through our day. Evelyn Underhill once said, “Hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”4 If she’s right—and I think she is—then once a week, we Boyds were total pros.

“Bedhead days” we came to call them, these times of extricating ourselves from the clutches of busy and intentionally focusing on rest. We didn’t have any rules on our bedhead days—in fact, rules would have mucked up everything. But if there were three guiding principles that emerged over time, they were be lazy, be together, and give grace.

We tend to attach our self-worth to these roles, but on a bedhead day, it’s time to lay them down. It’s time to rest from our roles and bask in the fact that we’re loved for who—not what—we are.